Aperture, Shutter Speed, and ISO

These three settings are part of what photographers like to call the exposure triangle. ISO is the digital camera sensor’s sensitivity to light. The aperture is a structure in your lens that works much like the iris in our eyes. It opens and close to let more or less light in, and also changes the depth of field, or how many different objects can remain in focus in the shot at the same time. Last is the shutter speed, which controls how much time the camera’s shutter remains open when taking a photo. A longer shutter opening will let in more light but may also cause blurring if any motion occurs while the photo is being taken. This is the same for film making. 

I found this picture explaining what each setting does, which will be very useful.

http://www.boredpanda.com/photography-shutter-speed-aperture-iso-cheat-sheet-chart-fotoblog-hamburg-daniel-peters/

Emperor's New Clothes

So a few days ago Panic! At The Disco's new video premièred. I was completely in love with it! It is so visually stunning so I decided to research it further and how exactly they did it. 

Apparently it was filmed in 12 fps to give it that eerie, jumpy and jerky movement. Because of this, they had to slow down the music to half it's original tempo on set. I have just watched back the video like this and you can see that they did this and sounds really weird and must have took ages to film.

I would love to film something like this one day (in 12 fps) as it looks stunning. 

Production Skills #3

This week we looked particularly at cameras. I have some pretty hefty notes for this lecture so bare with me. I'm just going to jot them down as I have in my notebook, in note form, not full sentences. Why? Because...

https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/ain%26039%3Bt-nobody-got-time-for-that

Canon XL1 

• M= manual (dial on camera). ON. Shoots in 4x3. 
• Exposure= amount of light (iris control). Gain standard = +0db. Makes more sensitive to light. Can degrade quality. Shutter speed= 50i, button behind iris control. 1/50= standard shutter speed. F.__ = iris. The higher, the less light goes in and the shallower the depth of field. F5.6-8 standard. Neutral density filter (NDF)= on or off. Sunglasses for camera.
• Stability function= for handheld camera. Reduces shake but not all of it.
• AF button- focuses in one push
• White balance= next to gain button. Light bulb= indoor. Sun= outdoor. Triangle, square, triangle button= fix white balance. Use white sheet of paper to correct.
• Audio 1, left - mic plug in. 'line' = mixing desks. 'mic' = microphone
• Canons= no phantom power. Use rode mic. 
• Gain= increasing sensitivity. Audio and video gain. Background hiss.
• Zoom. W- wide. T- telephoto. The closer, the more shake. 
• Eye piece= near and far settings. Don't trust in built monitors. 
• Use record button on SIDE.
• Lower the lens, the wider. 25mm= stretches perspective. 50mm = observer. 100mm= tighter crop and foreshortens perspective. 

Panasonic 3CCD

• Gain= low/med/high
• White balance= tungsten and daylight settings. AWB button- use white paper.
• ALWAYS ON MANUAL. Manual iris, next to gain option. Do not want it 'open'. 2.8= safe.
• More control of NDF filters. 
• Zebras= exposure range. 85% for white skin. 70% for black skin. 100% overexposed. Striped lines.
• Shoot in 4x3- aspect conv. option in menu
• Progressive= filmic but tears and ghosting if movement too fast.
• Interlace= fast action and can fix tears but can cause artefacts/blur.
• 50htz refresh rate (double the frame rate)

Phew I think that's it! We then filmed a tech demo of one of the cameras. We got given the Panasonic and we had to talk about setting up the audio and the white balance.