Something I have found challenging about this course this far, is that I feel it is working completely against what my instincts as a filmmaker are. I very much like to find and emotional intent of a scene and really focus on the piece resonating in some profound way. Yet I feel like in this class, every time we break up into groups and to shoot these pieces we are almost dehumanising the act of filmmaking by focusing on angles and focal lengths and highly technological aspects, which are obviously vital parts of the filmmaking process, however that’s all we end up discussing.
While I’m in no way ignorant about the importance of having creativity amongst the cinematography of a scene, and that in most cases what is being expressed in a film can most surely be traced back to the DOP’s work, I still feel that establishing what we are trying to communicate on a basic human level should always come first and then we should work on how we can use the art of cinema to reinforce that.
I feel very much alone in this practise in comparisons to my class mates who are so solely focused on trying to get unique kooky coverage. I find this a bit disheartening; as I am not really interested if something ‘looks’ cool if it doesn’t actually emote anything to the audience.
I have always felt that a film can still be amazing if it contains some shoddy camera work if it still manages to say something insightful, yet a film will most certainly sink if it can’t achieve this even if the cinematography is stunning. Working at the cinemas I’m able to see at least portions of nearly every film released here, and I experienced this feeling recently when standing at the back of ’50 Shades of Grey’, where I was surprised at how the sleek the film looked… that doesn’t distract my opinion the film is completely rubbish though.
I guess I want to use this realisation to inform me of how I will work in this class for the remainder of the semester and I certainly would be interested in researching and analysing the relationship between humanity and cinematography and how each of these things rely on each other for a film to be successful in our final pieces.