Like A Bridge Critique - Essay Example

?Director’s Like A Bridge is a story about Miranda, a middle-aged woman. Miranda’s inner conflict is her relative experience of comfort and success and a growing desire to have a better life. Miranda was fired from her company approximately a year ago and now her days are spent filling out job applications. While Miranda is in a state of distress, she has chosen to conceal this from her 17-year-old daughter Jessica, as Jessica is preparing to apply to college. In facing her challenging situation, Miranda has to an extent begun to imitate Jessica. Miranda starts Yoga and also attempts imitate Jessica’s eating practices by becoming a vegetarian. After a period Miranda begins to feel a degree of unfairness in her life; as a response she begins to act in distorted ways. She drinks whiskey and instigates a major argument with Jessica. Finally, Miranda receives a call about being hired for a job. Still, she can’t restore her broken relationship with Jessica. Working as a director of photography: My role in this film was as director of photography (DOP). Going into the project I was aware that the director of photography, or the cinematographer, is largely responsible for the artistic photography within the film. Meaning ‘writing with motion’, “...cinematography is more than the mere act of photography. It is the process of taking ideas, actions, emotional subtext, tone and all other forms of non-verbal communication and rendering them in visual terms” (Brown, 2002, p. ix). Within this context of understanding, much can be learned from the theories and practices employed by seminal directors of photography. One such consideration is the techniques used by cinematographers in the black and white era. Studio lighting from this era has oftentimes been implemented to create an authentic or naturalistic effect in contemporary cinematic production. In my own research I thoroughly explored texts on lighting, as well as participated in observational examination of the work of specific cinematographers. In interrogating cinematography in this specific work I analyzed mood, and the characters and subtext that the director wanted to create. The director indicated that he wanted to create a naturalistic atmosphere. Ultimately, we decided to use lighting as a means of storytelling and explicating internal character emotional states. After an extensive conversation with the director, we established that the primary function of the lighting should be as a means of indicating the main character’s dramatic changes. As Miranda struggles to find a job and her relationship with her daughter deteriorates the film lighting progressively grows darker. The narrative occurs over a period of four days; we recognized that the days should demonstrate differences in lighting, with the second and third progressively darker, but the bright forth day of hope. This style of lighting was established in the first scene and foreshadowed later narrative developments. The first scene consists of three shots. In the first show, Miranda is shown by the window; in the second shot she is a degree farther away from the window; in the third shot she is even father away. The intention was to make her face bright in the first shot as she is close to the window, so the light on her face was over-exposed. In the second shot, as she moves away from window, which was a source of light, the light on her face get darker. Finally, in the third shot, as she is sitting alone behind the table and her face is a bit dark, I made the light on her face under-exposed. Another prominent consideration was daytime lighting. The director and I agreed to use soft light for the daytime, as it can be used as overcast weather. Notably, the director didn’t want to use any practical lighting during the day. I also decided to use soft and strong ambient lighting for the whole room. As a means of implementing this approach I divided the natural lighting coming from the window, as well as the artificial light that was pretending to come from the window. In these regards, the artificial light became much stronger and raised the room’s ambience with minimal augmentation from the fill light. Since the key light was from the window, the corners of the room could be filled in darkness. The director agreed this would be an effective technique and suggested I watch the movie White Ribbon. After viewing the film we discussed the film’s implementation of daytime lighting. I noticed that the cinematographer didn’t light everything in room and in some scenes the main lighting source was coming from the window. I could see that some corners of the room were in darkness and the cinematographer lit details in the room that were important to the context of the film. We decided to use similar lighting in our film. For the nighttime scenes the most overarching notions was to include more light to create a moody atmosphere. I suggested we have more contrast lighting during night scenes and the director agreed with that approach. The reason for my suggestions was that I believed it would be more effective if we only saw the mother and daughter interaction scenes during the night. For the daytime scenes, we would only witness the mother alone. I believed it would be effective to include a degree of contrasting lighting during the daytime, as this would emphasize the mother’s internal conflict. Another technique that I considered was implementing high contrast lighting in the night scenes to emphasize the contradiction between mother and daughter. In these regards, I recommended the director watch the movie Rosetta. This film makes poignant use of contrast lighting in the scenes between Rosetta and her mother. The cinematographer of this film also used practical light as a primary source and used motivation light for the practical light. One of the unique aspects of this film was also the mise-en-scene framing elements in relation to the lighting: In Rosetta, some parts of room are completely in dark and as the character enters the room, they frequently walk to the dark part of room obscuring their faces. I explained the technique to the director and he agreed that we should use same kind of lighting for the night scenes. This technique was considered in relation to later set-design elements that emerged during pre-production. The collaboration between the director of photography and the production designer is absolutely crucial to realizing the appropriate film aesthetic. Our discussions about mood and composition went hand-in-hand with our technical and aesthetic choices about tonal palette and texture. Throughout pre-production we developed an advanced understanding of the filmic aesthetic, but it wasn’t until production design that this theoretical approach took tangible form. I discussed the idea of using lighting as a tool to emphasize the protagonist’s inner conflict, as well as the conflict between the mother (protagonist) and daughter. The production designer also had similar ideas and she wanted to use a counter between the kitchen and living room to create a dichotomy between the mother and daughter. I felt we had the same perspective. Since there was a scene where the mother and daughter were both in the kitchen, I felt one practical light wasn’t enough. I suggested that we have two practical lights in the kitchen. One was an overhead table light and the other was a fluorescent light. Then we could distinguish the mother and daughter by two different lights. In one scene, as they are in the kitchen, the daughter stands up in a side where the key light was practical fluorescent light; here I used kino light as a motivation light. In this same scene, the mother is sitting next to the table and I decided to use the overhead table light as a key light and use the 1k light as a motivation. Also, I decided to use another 1k as a fill light that emerges from the corridor next to the kitchen. I had a clear vision about what I wanted to do with lighting but I had to experiment and see the result. The next stop for me was experimentation with the lighting. The camera operator and I practiced everyday and tried different lighting set-ups; we took photos to check the result. Unfortunately, we were unable to test the actual film stock on stills. Still, as a student this process was invaluable as a student. We were able to test 100ft of the Kodak 5222 motion picture stock, but 100 feet still goes by pretty quickly on screen and doesn't offer the cinematographer a real chance to test the latitude of the stock F-stop by F-stop. With still photographs, a single image can be projected and with just a few frames of film you can test the whole range of stock and see how it responds to different quality light relative to skin tones. Anyway, I used my own digital SLR camera to check the results of different lighting set-ups and checked them with the director. During exercises, I read books about lighting. I learned a lot during this research period. Gerald Millerson’s book was very helpful since it explained everything about basic lighting. From this book I learned to draw a lighting plan before staring to film. Millerson notes: “The particular value of this method is that a great deal of the planning and preparation can be carried out long before the actual lighting process begins (p.171).” This plan was very helpful to me. During practice, I wrote some notes and later drew the lighting plans based on these notes. With the lighting plan, I felt more confident for filming. Part 2: Benjamin Bergery, in his influential book, Reflection (2002), said, ‘If you want to be a good DP, pay all the money you have for the best gaffers to hire’. I strong agree with this sentiment. It is the gaffer who handles the lighting, after all. After a long search, I was able to find a gaffer with a deep knowledge of film lighting. I improved the quality of my lighting method through my gaffer’s insights; whenever I made a mistake in lighting, he developed alternative ideas, allowing me more options. I wanted to make my gaffer as independent as possible, giving him as much creative freedom as I could. For example, I gave a light?meter to my gaffer. As he had his own light-meter, he could work more independently once he knew about my lighting concept. In this way, my gaffer and I saved a great deal of time. In many instances, we had to set up in multiple areas in a short time period. While I was doing the light setup in the first area, he setup for the second area, with, of course, the F?stops and contrast ratios I had established. During the filming, the shooting schedule changed due to actor problems. This caused me a lot of unexpected troubles. Since changing the light from day to night requires a lot of time, we were first supposed to shoot the daytime scenes and then film the nighttime scenes. As it happened, when the main character and her daughter were arguing together, we filmed part of the scene but the director wasn’t happy with the daughter’s acting. This resulted in us having to film her acting separately on another day; this was risky in terms of lighting continuity. After we finished filming part of that scene, we changed the lighting set-up to daytime. The next day, I had to change the lighting set-up back to night to finish that scene. I was afraid because I didn’t know if the continuity would be accurate. As I viewed the rushes for this scene, I noticed that there was a lighting continuity problem. I had to admit that I made a mistake, because I should have made a detailed lighting note after each shot. My failure to create exactly the same ambience as in the previous shoot was due to my lack of lighting notes. This consequently caused a few lighting discontinuities in that scene. In other instances, I was concerned about the continuity of lighting from interior to exterior shots. There is a scene where the main character looked outside through a window. We filmed that shot in studio and I lit her face over-exposed, as if she was close to the window. Because it was supposed to be a bright day, I wanted the window to be burned over. I also didn’t want the audience to see what was going on behind the window. Rather, I wanted the audience to concentrate on the lives of the characters and how the characters’ problems are, to a degree, caused by society’s economic breakdown. I got this idea from the film, The World of Apu. In this film there is a scene where the protagonist talks to his teacher and says that he can’t continue to study because he has to work. In that scene, we see that the windows are over-exposed and we can’t see the outside world. Later we notice that the reason that main character is not able to continue his study is rooted in society’s economic problems and he has to work instead of studying. In that scene, the cinematographer uses lighting to demonstrate that he is aware of what’s going on outside the room, but instead wants to concentrate on the effect of this economic problem on the main character’s existence. In terms of our film, I was worried about whether the interior shot would be able to match the exterior in terms of lighting continuity. We checked the broadcast news and chose a sunny day to shoot the exterior. Finally, a sunny day occurred and we went to the location to shoot. Everything went perfect and I was content with the results. But again, we had acting problems and they weren’t ready. We had to wait and as the actors became ready, the day became overcast, resulting in lighting discontinuity for that scene. After screening the critics mentioned that since the UK frequently has overcast weather, it’s very risky matching interior and exterior lighting. I agree with this assessment because I believe that discontinuity in a film results in disconnections between the film and the audience. All the cinematic elements should work to draw the audience into the filmic world -- what I did disrupted this experience. Indeed, some critics said that their attention wasn’t draw to the film and they get bored. In part, I attribute this to the discontinuity of lighting. Another mistake that occurred in terms of lighting was in the dinner scene, where the mother and daughter were sitting behind the table having an argument. I used the overhead practical table light as a key light and added a 1k light with diffusion as a motivated light. In that scene, I wanted to use a single source of light to create a moody and contrasting atmosphere. I decided to not use any fill light; this was risky but I felt strong about trying this style of lighting. I watched the actors’ movements behind the table and I ensured that the light was one stop under-exposed. I came to recognize that with this lighting the actors’ space was very limited. Furthermore, the actors couldn’t move their heads freely since they might go to darkness. The way I lit them killed their freedom of movement and they had to act in a very small space and with very small movements. But as they rehearsed the scene, they were in the light and everything was perfect. Yet as we started filming, they couldn’t control their movements and sometimes they turned their head to a different direction making their faces dark and not allowing the audience to see their eyes. Since we were running out of film stock, we couldn’t afford to repeat the shot. It was my mistake to not use any fill light, as I can’t expect actors to sacrifice their performance because of lighting. I could have used some fill light on their faces to see their expressions. It was a very emotional scene but since the audience couldn’t see the actors’ eyes, they couldn’t connect to the characters. As one of the critics mentioned after the screening, the eyes are the mirrors of the soul and if we can’t see their eyes, we can’t understand their feelings. I have to admit that I ruined that scene by bad lighting. Another problem that I encountered during shooting were the characters’ changing movement in some scenes. As at times the director implemented improvisation, some positions and movements changed. One notable example of this occurred in the living room night scene where the mother and daughter had an argument about the mother’s drunken behavior. As I observe the characters’ positions, I noticed that the daughter was so close to the wall that I couldn’t provide any backlight for her. I decided to try backlighting her from the top of the wall. But I noticed that since she was so close to the wall, the reflection of light hits her blonde hair and makes it shine. It wasn’t logical or naturalistic to notice the light from top since there was no practical light from the ceiling. I tried to decrease the amount of light to prevent seeing any reflection on her hair, but her hair was too blonde and as she made small movements, the reflection of light appeared. I decided to use light from the corridor that comes to the room as a backlight for the character, but since the actress wanted to leave soon and was starting to get angry, the director decided to film without using any backlight. I tried to insist that we need to use some backlight, but as the director was worred that his actress might leave, we decided against it. As the French New Wave cinematographer Raoul Courtard once said: “If you have a choice, you should always sacrifice the time you would use to light for the sake of the director, assuming that the director is going to use that time well. No one will ever go see a film because the cinematography is magnifique” (p.206). I also believe that the last thing a cinematographer should do is take over the director’s position, thinking that his/her idea is better than the director’s. Clearly, the fundamental role of the cinematographer is to ‘support’ his/her director by using the light, not to dominate the director. Anyway, the result of that scene was that some shots were flat and there was limited depth of field. Still, the acting in the scene was very good and the critics mentioned this aspect. In retrospect, it seems that good acting covers bad lighting. Looking back, I think that the director was right not to sacrifice acting for lighting. Concluding Reflections This term was a great experience in term of creative collaborative. We had several meetings before shooting to discuss our ideas about filming. From casting actors, to finding locations, building the set and filming -- everyone was involved in the project. As the course progressed, we became even more experienced collaborators. This term we didn’t have any arguments or disagreements that hindered our creative progress. Indeed, the fourth term was filled with good memories. I feel so fortunate to meet such great friends. This term was also a great experience as a director of photography. Still, lighting the film-set for the first time had mixed results, with both exciting and scary moments. It was like creating something from nothing. You go to the empty black room and are tasked with positioning the sun and moon. Like a painter, you have to mix different light sources to create life. Since all the members had a very close working relationship, I had the chance to learn about all aspects of the filmmaking process -- directing acting, casting, producing and production design. After finishing this term, I feel that I had a great journey through the technical and artistic world of filmmaking. Read More

 

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