I originally wrote this portion of my proposal at the very end but I’ve decided that I want to start off with it so I can make it immediately clear what it is exactly that I want to achieve through this work. So considering that every time I touch a camera I generally stuff something up, I have definitely shied away from working as a DOP previously and I’ve been trying to remedy this lately by familiarising myself with the technical aspects of a camera, so now with this opportunity for the rest of the semester I want to go a step further and focus on gaining a fundamental understanding of how I can use the art of cinematography to the best of its ability to further communicate things that I want expressed in my films.
The idea to study this topic came to me whilst we were doing these weekly exercises in class. Every time we’d break up into our little groups to discuss what shots we’d use for the clip, I’d feel a yearning to extend that discussion into figuring out how we could use shots that were not only aesthetically pleasing but imbued the scene with a further layer of emotion or expression beyond what was being performed by the actors. Yet I’ve always been intimidated to present this idea to the group as I know that I would have no idea how to address this myself and it of course becomes incredibly impractical to waste precious filming time to sit around discussing ideas as opposed to actually shooting something, which is an incredibly valuable lesson in itself of how to figure out a way to infuse any bit of creativity into a film under such demanding conditions.
So the idea actually came to me as I was mulling about these thoughts whilst I was just writing down my stream of consciousness in a blog post, where I eventually landed on the idea that I want to research the relationship between Cinematography and Humanity.
There was just something about these two words that really resonated with me and sparked some sort of interest that kept me thinking back to it for days. So the first step I took was to try and figure out what I was even talking about. So I’ve now deduced that what it is that I want to explore is how films that manage to say something honest and incredibly profound about the human condition have used camera work to reinforce this.
The work that I’ll be doing will be part research as well as practical which in this case is necessary as I want to look at the work of people that I admire too see how they’ve established this and then to further let that inform my own craft.
Amongst the library of films I want to draw upon are quite a few Italian Neo-realist films especially Rome, Open City and Bicycle Thieves which is probably because my family was living in Italy at the time that these films were being released so there is that personal connection. Other films include Her, Dallas Buyers Club, Wild, Sunrise and Beasts of the Southern Wild amongst others.
I also think it’s important to look at films that fail at achieving this as that communicates just as much as successes.
Finally, the way I’m going to channel this into a practise is that I want to shoot scenes where I completely strip away all dialogue, sound, production design as well has having non professional actors to see if I can establish some form of emotion through the camera work alone. I contemplated with the idea of doing this for a while and whether it was redundant or not seeing as though I’m never planning on making a film under these conditions beyond this exercise, but ultimately I think it’ll be a great luxury to be able to completely focus my energy on cinematography, and if it does fail I’m sure there will be a lesson in that somewhere and I can always film something again altering my restraints.