The concept and the journey
The concept: researching and sourcing filmmaker specific comments on their experiences with devising, executing and finalising scene coverage – and the challenges that arise in the process.
This research project has taken me on a rather long and winding journey through many facets of decoupage and camera coverage. Initially I had planned and hoped to be interviewing filmmakers directly about their experiences on our studios topic – but I must admit I had great difficulty getting in touch with the vast majority of the filmmakers I had hoped to speak to, for a variety of reasons. Some of my potential interviewees had essentially sworn off the internet, others were busy in some stage of production or post-production and most commonly, I just simply received no reply to my attempts at contact. I must admit some degree of guilt in this, as I probably should have allowed more time to garner a response. My initial messages may have been sent some weeks ago, but as I worked down my list I’ve gotten closer and closer to now, when I’m piecing together this report. As such the form that this research project has morphed into is more of a presentation of some of the more interesting research I did in preparing to interview the various filmmakers I attempted to reach out to – together with some analysis of the few responses I did gain from Roger Deakins, who as we’ve discussed previously is well known for how forthcoming he is with his expertise and insights on his personal forum. In any case, with that long winded explanation out of the way, I’ll now get onto presenting what I’ve found on the various coverage-adjacent topics I’ve researched – together with some of my own thoughts that were prompted in the process.
The establishing shot – what purpose does it serve, and is it even necessary?
This topic was one I didn’t set out to research, and in truth I had not structured any of my initial questions around anything so specific as when and how to use a specific shot such as this. Instead this topic arose from researching what cinematographer Jarin Blaschke (The Lighthouse (2019), The Witch (2015)) had to say on the topic of scene coverage. This research led me to stumble onto a forum post on cinematography.com, a site on which Blaschke is apparently a semi-active participant.
A user on the site posed the question of whether an establishing shot is necessary, to which Jarin Blaschke had this to say:
The question is completely contingent on the style of the film. There is no right answer.
But for me anyway, the more I do this, the more I feel that the audience’s understanding of specific 3-dimensional geography is overrated, even utterly unnecessary.
That said, I tend to establish important spaces fully at the beginning of a movie to get it out of the way, but by having a character lead us through the space so it’s “organic” and part of the storytelling. It can have intention rather than water the scene down. After that’s done, we feel very comfortable in shooting the rest of the movie however we want. Caleb leads us through the house in “The Witch” and Ephraim leads us through the lodgings at the beginning of “The Lighthouse.” The cable-up shot up the interior lighthouse tower does it too, but justified differently: we are drawn up toward the light by some sort of “other-ly” power.
When I’m part of the design, I like to approach the “wide master” the same way as an “insert”: with extreme discretion. To varying degree, they take you out of the scene, so I often try to include these images as part of a multi-stage mise-en-scene. Otherwise, at the very least, I aim them toward the beginning or end of the scene. They can be effective “buttons” for closing emphasis but feel clunky in the middle of scenes… but if placed well, that hard “clunk” can be effective too.
There’s a lot to unpack in this statement from Blaschke, so I suppose I’ll start from the top:
“I feel the audience’s understanding of specific 3-dimensional geography is overrated, even utterly unnecessary.”
This idea of an audience understanding spatial relations in a scene is something I’ve always had trouble getting my head around personally – largely because I find myself with the same opinion as Jarin here; I just don’t see the need to establish a space in terms of its actual geography. Of course there are exceptions here – such as establishing the proximity of two performers to each other during a dialogue scene – but I think what Jarin is reacting to here is the sort of arbitrary establishing shot that tends to open a scene in a lot of films. What I think he’s trying to get at is perhaps there’s a different way to get the point of an establishing shot across, which doesn’t necessarily require a wide shot.
“I like to approach the wide master the same way as an insert: with extreme discretion… I often try to include these images as part of a multi-stage mise-en-scene.”
This part of the quote from Jarin is perhaps the part I find the most insightful and also the most exciting. In a way, seeing this quote from Jarin and then rewatching some of his films to see it in action, has kind of opened my eyes to a different approach to ‘establishing’ a scene. I find it genuinely exciting from a filmmaking perspective the kind of highly staged, character motivated establishing shot he is talking about here – and honestly I’m looking forward to the next project that comes up where I may be able to experiment with this very concept.
You can find the complete forum post here: https://cinematography.com/index.php?/topic/84129-film-discussion-how-essential-is-establishing-shot/&tab=comments#comment-529746
Performance, and how it is enhanced and enabled by decoupage
The on-set relationships of Directors and Cinematographers to their actors was a topic I was really hoping to unpack through the course of this research project, and while I wasn’t able to get as much insight into this (particularly in regards to how it relates to coverage) as I had hoped, I did get look into it to a limited extent. A lot of my thinking around this topic arose both from discussion in our studio classes, but also from the ‘Team Deakins’ podcast (with Roger and James Deakins), where they often touch loosely on the relationship between actors and the camera. On episode 63, Roger and James spoke with cinematographer Greig Fraser (Rogue One (2016), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Vice (2018)) about The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), a film which Roger shot. In the process of this discussion, Roger made a statement that I found rather interesting, here’s what he said:
“When you have such great actors, you don’t have to do much.”
Roger was so tantalisingly close to elaborating on this on the podcast, but ultimately ended up moving onto the next topic, so I felt the need to go onto his forum and ask him to speak to it further. Unfortunately I think I went a little off topic in my questioning and ended up with a different (but no less insightful) comment than I had initially expected. Here’s the question and answer:
Hey Roger! On the podcast episode about The Assassination of Jesse James, you said something along the lines of “when you have such great actors, you don’t have to do much.” I was wondering if I could get you to elaborate on this further!
For instance, if an actor is delivering a really excellent performance, does that change the way you shoot a scene? Do you light differently? Choose different shots, or less coverage even? Does a great performance enable a simpler approach to a scene?
Conversely, if an actor is struggling to get the performance a director is trying to garner from them – do you feel the need to compensate for this in any way as a cinematographer?
I appreciate these questions don’t necessarily have simple answers, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on these topics!
And Roger’s response:
“If a director is unhappy with a performance you might shoot more shots and also shots that you hadn’t initially intended to shoot, so that a performance can be built in the edit. I can honestly say that I can only remember having to do this when working with some young children.”
While this response kind of dodges the questions I really wanted an answer to – that being on how working with a good performance might affect how a cinematographer works. This certainly is a lesson in the art of interviewing, one which I’m clearly not experienced in as of yet. With that said though, there’s still some genuinely useful insights in Roger’s response here – and we can infer some answers to the part of the questions to which Roger didn’t respond. Of course Roger’s response speaks for itself in terms of how a cinematographer might work with a lacking performance – by introducing more shots and more coverage so that something may be salvaged in the editing room. But by inverting his response we can see perhaps how a cinematographer may work with a great performance. The assumption I’m making here is that if you need more coverage for a poor performance, then perhaps you can get away with less for a great performance – or at the very least choose shots which are more specific. Roger did speak to this to a degree in another forum post that I found on his site on the topic of ‘shooting for the edit’. In this post Roger speaks about working with the Coen Brothers, and in particular how they would often cut the wide master shot where they knew they’d “going into coverage” as Roger puts it. The more common approach these days is to film the entire scene from the master and then go into close ups for whatever moments require it – in that way allowing the director to build the performance in the edit, as Roger spoke about in the response he gave me. To me this basically just speaks to what we’ve spoken about at length in class – that a great actor will enable less coverage and in a lot of cases, a more specific idea of a scene can be carried through from pre-production and into the edit room if the performance is solid enough.
Forum post available here: https://www.rogerdeakins.com/composition/how-does-performance-inform-your-decision-making/
The ‘found’ shot: discovering things on the day of filming
This topic in particular is one that I find myself quite intensely interested in, as it’s a sort of approach I have often associated with a great deal of the films that I appreciate the most. It’s also a topic that Roger Deakins speaks about frequently on his podcast – often suggesting that key shots from the films he has made were discovered on the day of filming. My impression of this was that it meant Directors and Cinematographers were discovering shots they had never thought of in pre-production, or perhaps filling a gap in their coverage they hadn’t thought of until the day of filming. As I discovered though, this assumption may have been a little naive in a lot of cases. Here’s the question I posed to Roger Deakins in the topic:
Hey Roger! You speak on your podcast a lot about discovering shots on the day of filming – either reacting to something an actor is doing or what the light or location is doing, etc. I was wondering how you collaborate with directors to find these shots? Do you often suggest a lot of shots yourself or is this generally initiated by the director?
And how do you know when an additional shot is needed? Is it just a case of finding a shot that’s too good to pass up? Or would you say these found shots are more to plug holes in coverage or possibly even provide a different interpretation of a scene? Perhaps all of the above?
And Roger’s response:
“The ‘found’ shot may replace anything that was preconceived and are not to just ‘plug holes’ in ‘coverage’. That implies shooting a lot of angles and there might be a problem cutting them together. That is not how I work or how the directors I work with work either. A ‘found’ shot can be found by the director or the cinematographer. My dolly grip, Bruce Hamme, was always suggesting shots or little camera moves. Just stay open to anything and everything.”
Clearly from this response, Roger seems to take issue with the idea that these shots somehow appear out of thin air on the day, as if their purpose or need was never considered by the director prior to the shoot. In actuality it would seem that when Roger is speaking about ‘discovering’ shots on the day of filming, what he may actually mean is he is discovering a way of shooting something on the day. Like for instance a shot he spoke about on his podcast was from The Assassination of Jesse James *SPOILER (kind of)* in the scene in which Robert Ford finally shoots Jesse James. Roger mentioned that they hadn’t conceived the shot in which Robert raises his gun as being seen in the reflection of a framed picture on the wall. It would seem from the response to my question, that they would have obviously known they needed that shot – of Robert pointing his gun at Jesse, but that until the day of filming they didn’t know it would be framed in the reflection instead of filmed in a more ‘standard’ manner. This makes a lot more sense when I think about it. The kinds of films Roger works on are tightly scripted and scheduled, and in all likelihood if Roger or the directors he works with were discovering entirely new shots on a regular basis on the day of filming, they’d never ‘make the day’.
Also of significance here, even if it is a little removed from the original topic, is that Roger points out that the collaborative process of working out and discovering these shots is a collaborative one. In this case Roger mentions that his dolly grip regularly assists him in working out how a shot will move or look. I’m sure Roger would have plenty of examples of this exact thing, perhaps his production designer may make him aware of something they’ve built into the set design, or an actor may suggest a way they could move through a space. Regardless of how it happens, it’s good just to know that a cinematographer at the absolute peak of their field and craft such as Roger still has this kind of open and unpretentious approach to filmmaking.
Forum post available here: https://www.rogerdeakins.com/set-stuff/discovering-shots-on-the-day/
Building perspective into coverage
Another filmmaker for whom I have a great deal of respect is director Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse (2019), The Witch (2015)). Robert is currently deep in post-production on another upcoming film, and as such I was understandably not able to gain a response from him. However, much to my excitement, I did find an interview with him in which he speaks with some detail on the rather elusive topic of why a director chooses the specific shots that they do – in regards to a personal favourite of mine; The Lighthouse. Here’s the relevant section of the interview:
“Jarin [Blaschke, the cinematographer] and I worked very closely together on developing this. It was our intention to tell the story through Rob’s eyes in the beginning, and the end shots are our objective director point of view. From the shot where Rob watches the lighthouse-tender disappear into the mist, up until the third-to-last shot of the movie, it’s from his perspective.
Now, you may not experience that as an audience the whole time. I hope you do. But when Jarin and I were deciding where to place the camera, we were thinking about how Rob was experiencing this moment. There are a couple scenes from Willem’s point of view, but only rarely. And then — it’s not like the least amount of cuts is somehow better, but we’re trying to get to something very essential, so we’d start out with a scene we were shooting from four angles, and get it down to two or three. Sometimes shot / reverse-shot is the best way to do things, but I’ve never shot a scene with traditional coverage, and probably won’t.
You can build a sense of momentum in the scene when you do a long oner. It captures a kind of energy if it’s done right. And certainly there are things about the cinematic language of this movie that are referencing old cinema. Not necessarily with any specific films in mind, but the handmade feeling, the way the camera operating is sometimes a bit off. We talked about how big the gear-head in Fritz Lang’s camera was — it wasn’t in good shape, and it shows in his films.”
As we’ve spoken about on many occasions through the semester, these kinds of statements from actual film practitioners on and around the topic of scene coverage seem to be so very rare, so quite frankly thank god for this interview. The Lighthouse to me is such an immersive film in so many regards – it’s the kind of filmmaking which I love the most, in that it seems to be immaculately conceived in virtually all aspects, which reflects in how glued I was to that film when I first saw it in the cinema. This sort of simplification of the approach Egger’s had for this film I find to be really insightful – not least because he seems to be asking of himself the same questions I ask when working through a scenes coverage in some of the projects I’ve been apart of. That central question being; who is this scene about? The answer isn’t necessarily always in the script – but it does fundamentally change how an audience understands a film. I find it particularly interesting that Eggers considers and intended the entirety of the film to be from Robert Pattinson’s perspective – even when the camera is looking at Pattinson, the audience is still there with his character, seeing the story unfold as he does. This quote from Eggers is so instructional to me, as in a way it kind of demystifies how a filmmaker would even start to come up with a scenes coverage for such a specific film as The Lighthouse. In many ways I think this sort of approach to building perspective into an entire film could well be the thing that gets me thinking on the right track for future projects I hopefully get to work on.
Non-standard coverage – how to make it work
Note: the relevant section runs from the beginning to about 1:48.
Another example I’ve raised before in this class for it’s approach to coverage is the show Mr Robot. It’s idiosyncratic framing and shot selection is part of what makes it so special to me, so for that reason I was really hoping to hear from some of the shows creatives on how exactly they came around to this unique approach and how they managed to maintain it throughout the shows runtime. That’s where this interview with the shows cinematographer Tod Campbell comes in. There’s so much about Tod’s approach to filmmaking that I have a great deal of respect and admiration for, and a lot of that is encapsulated in the beginning of this video.
Perhaps the most important thing in regards to our studios topic here though, is his comment about the way they implemented the unique framing and coverage into the show – especially in regards to avoiding the appearance of utilising some kind of visual gimmick. I think the most important comment he makes here is on how in order to pull it off, he and Sam Esmail (the shows creator and director) needed to be both bold and consistent in their approach. It would seem from what Campbell is saying here that there was absolutely no room to doubt whether their unique approach would work or not, and just trust that it would, and that it was right for the story they were telling. That last point there is the other important element at play in Mr Robot – that is that the choices in camera coverage are born out of the story and the character itself. As I’ve said before, the visual language that this show has is a big part of what makes it so special to me – and the utter conviction with which they’ve pulled it off, I imagine will remain as a constant drive and inspiration for me throughout my career.
Conclusion
Needless to say there are so many more concepts that we’ve looked at this semester, and so many more filmmakers and films that I spent time researching through the process of building out this project – but I’m quite aware of how long this already is so I think it’s perhaps best to leave it here. Even though the final output of this assignment perhaps didn’t reach my somewhat lofty ambitions for it going in – I’ve still gotten so much out of looking into the coverage of a great deal of films for which I have such a deep appreciation. Who knows, maybe as more time passes I could even get some responses from some of the messages I sent out throughout the process of putting this assignment together. But for now that’ll do it – I hope I’ve collated something of interest here, for those interested in our field of study.
~ Noah.