What if somebody told you that in order to really get the film look you had to have all of this? What? What?
Seriously? Right. You know what I'd say to that? Excuse me, I don't think you know what you're talking about!
During the three-day flight to lunar orbit, the problems encountered had been more annoyances than critical, such as paint flaking off the lunar module. Yo, Darius Spirit here, and this is how to master the film look on a budget. Save some money. Of course, you can never truly...
Master anything but with a few basics some tricks a ton of practice anything's possible We should probably start with what is the film look most people would agree that the film look is when you've got an image that Looks like it belongs on the big screen So we're just gonna go with that now to get that look we've got to talk about camera settings techniques a few secrets and Execution I do believe it about that time Lego I'm gonna demonstrate the proper settings on my Canon 60D, but you have all of these settings in your camera. Everything needs to be set to manual. Nothing should be in auto. Frame rate.
Frame rate should be set to 24 frames per second. 25 in some countries. If you shoot at 30 frames per second, it'll look too smooth. It'll have that kind of soap opera feel to it. We don't want that.
Shutter speed. The shutter speed directly affects your motion blur. Shutter speed should be set to 1 48th of a second. If your camera cannot do 1 48th then we round up to 1 50th. This will give us that cinematic motion blur that you're used to seeing in movies.
Whichever the frame rate is you double it to find your shutter speed. This is called the 180 degree shutter rule. Now if I were to increase the frame rate to 60 frames per second slow motion then I'd have to change my shutter speed to 1 120th of a second.
Now if we drop the shutter speed down to 1 30th we get too much motion blur if we increase the shutter speed to 1 230th of a second you severely reduce the motion blur which gives your images a very jittery frenetic effect they also use this effect in saving private ryan to capture the nightmare of war iso when you set your iso you're adjusting your camera's level of sensitivity to light The bigger the number, the more light sensitive the camera becomes. If you're shooting out in daylight, your ISO is going to be around 1 to 200 for most cameras. If you're shooting indoors, your ISO is probably going to be around 800, again for most cameras.
If you set your ISO too high, you get digital noise. We don't want that. Some cameras can go up to 2 or 3,000 ISO and still produce a really, really clean image.
The Sony A7 series cameras can pretty much shoot in the dark. Dynamic range. Dynamic range is the range between the brightest part of the image and the darkest. Cameras are not as sophisticated as the human eye, they can only handle a certain range of brightness at a time. With most cameras you'll find that if you expose for the shadows, anything in sunlight will blow out.
As you can see we lose lots of information in the blown out areas, and it can't be recovered in post no matter how much you mess with the image. On the flip side, if you expose for the highlights then the shadows are too dark. That's because the camera can't handle such extreme differences in brightness. It can help in a number of ways. If your subject is in the shade, shoot them against a shaded background.
This helps minimize the extremes in brightness. We can also underexpose the shot by a couple of stops to protect the highlights, then just brighten it back up in post. It's a great way to protect your highlights.
Picture Styles The default picture styles are very sharp and saturated. Lots of contrast. If you plan to actually color grade your footage later on, you don't want to use this.
Most cameras are going to have a flat or neutral preset for picture styles. You can use that to flatten or desaturate the image. Shooting flat gives you the most flexibility in post. You can pull out more details in the shadows and highlights, unlike if you shoot fully saturated. Remember, you can always add colors and contrast and saturation later on.
Focus. If you have autofocus on the lens, switch it off. We don't like to use autofocus because nobody wants to see focus hunting.
If this is all new to you and you're face looks like this right now relax you'll be fine just keep shooting stuff you'll pick it up aspect ratio most high def cameras shoot in a 16 by 9 aspect ratio but we also see films that use an ultra wide 2 3 5 aspect ratio there are a few different ways to create this letterbox effect but the easiest way is to download a pre-masked image drag it into your editing application and drop it although that is the easiest way to do it it's not The best way, the best way to do it is to actually change your sequence settings in Premiere to 1920 by 817 and that should give you the correct aspect ratio upon export. I want to make something very clear. The 235 aspect ratio is not required for the film look.
It's just a stylistic choice. It won't be appropriate for every film. Film grain.
You can also give your film some film grain to add that old school film look. I love film grain. There are a few plugins and sites for this, but you've got to spend money, which may or may not be an issue for you.
You can do a Google search and find Film Grain for free in a number of different places, one of which is on YouTube. Just drag and drop it in, change the blend mode to overlay, reduce the opacity to 50 or 60 percent, and boom, you got Film Grain. Film Grain, however, isn't necessary for the film look.
It is a stylistic choice. Keep that in mind. When we talk about technique, we're talking about the specialized skills you need to build in order to create filmic work.
Audio. It doesn't matter how amazing your images look, bad audio will completely destroy the cinematic illusion. Audio is the biggest distinguisher between work that looks... professional and work that looks like it was shot by an amateur. You don't have to have the best equipment for this, just give it as much attention as you do everything else.
Sounds reasonable. Right? You want to get your mics as close to your actors as you can.
If you can get them at least three feet away, you're golden. This is what the audio sounds like when the microphone is plugged into a sound recorder. This is like the best possible scenario.
You're going to get really clean sound. You're not going to have a whole lot of floor noise. And it's going to be sharp because, well, we've got the microphone really close to our actor.
So this is what the audio sounds like when the mic is plugged directly into the camera. It's not as good as a sound recorder, but it's still really good because the mic itself is still close to me. So we may have to do a little bit of denoising in post, but it's still very usable.
This is what it sounds like when we're using the camera's built-in microphone. As you can see, it doesn't sound really good because the mic is like way, way, way over here. See, now I sound better. If we just kind of float above this whole thing and think about why audio is so important, it's because without good audio, you can't get into the stories and performances. Getting good performances is number two, right behind good audio.
It doesn't matter how pretty your film looks if people stop watching 40 seconds into it because the acting is awful. Look at the whole mumblecore movement. In many cases the lighting and framing were not the best, but these guys built film careers off of creating films with good naturalistic performances.
If you want to get good performances, take some acting classes, learn about acting, learn how to use improv and guided improv to get natural performances out of non-actors. Framing and composition. The thing that's gonna make the biggest difference visually is your framing and composition.
Use the rule of thirds to improve your compositions. Give your actors headroom and look space to look into frame. Learn how to use central framing, leading lines.
Framing and composition will help you get the film look more than anything else for a few reasons. One, you can make a great film without lights, but you can't make a great film with poor framing and composition. 2. Getting good frames and strong compositions doesn't cost you anything.
Sorry. If you want to learn more about framing and composition, I did an entire 20 minute video on it. Link is in the description. Film grammar.
Film is literally a visual language and it takes time to practice and learn that language, just like any other language. Film grammar isn't about what you're shooting, it's about how you're shooting it. When should you use a close up? When should you use a medium shot? A wide shot?
When do you use a POV? What's the psychology behind any given shot? Directors like Alfred Hitchcock were masters of film grammar. They knew just where to put the camera to get the reaction out of their audience, and they also knew exactly what that reaction would be. You can learn the basics of filmmaking in two weeks, but learning and mastering film grammar, that takes a lifetime of study.
And that's because it's an organic language that changes and evolves with new generations. Lighting. Just like good and good audio, lighting will make or break your film in terms of how cinematic It looks and feels.
Here's what you might start off with before you light a scene. First I turn off some of these house lights. Then you can set a key light.
Bouncing it off of walls or ceilings really softens the source. Looking better. Next you can throw a rim light to help separate your subject from the background. My subject is already separated by contrast so it's just kind of adding dimension to her.
face you may want to add fill light to fill in some of the shadows on the face in this case i'm shooting in a really small room so i don't need it because there's kind of enough ambient light bouncing around where the shadows aren't as prominent now this light in the back is super distracting so i'm gonna go ahead on and move it away from the wall so we can reduce some of that blown out detail and then i'm gonna dim it down just just keep now here's what the scene looked like before i lit it And here's what it looks like after. A lot better, right? We actually can see the actor. And the light isn't distracting. Natural lighting.
If you don't have lights, you can always use sunlight. It's free. You can use window light as a key light. Right now, I'm being lit by the daylight streaming through the window here.
Looks decent from the front. And even as side lighting. Let me back away from the window.
Now, what's happening to the light? It's not looking so good anymore, right? You gotta stay close to the windows. Also, avoid pointing the camera at a window unless you want to become a silhouette. Common mistake.
You can also shoot in well-lit industrial areas and take advantage of all that available light. The only issue is you won't be able to control the quality of the light, but it's better than nothing. You could have an Arri Alexa, but if your lighting is absolute crap, it will still look like you shot your film with a potato. Depth of field? Depth of field is the distance between the nearest and furthest objects in focus.
People think a shallow depth of field is associated with the film look, but actually, there are a ton of movies that mostly use a broad depth of field. Like Drive, for example. The super shallow depth of field thing is more a product of the digital revolution, really. Shooting your actors with a shallow depth of field can be very cinematic, and it really helps.
Separate your subjects from the background. First, if your actors are by any walls, we need to move them away from the walls. Then zoom into or switch to a longer focal length lens. This allows us to throw the background out of focus.
We can also control the depth of field by adjusting the aperture. If I take a shot at F4, I get something that looks like this. But if I take another shot at F1.8, I get something that looks like this. Way more beautiful.
out of focusness in the background. Music. Your use of music has a huge impact on how your audience will take your film.
Music can go a long way in setting tone. For example, I'm using classical upbeat music in this tutorial because I want you guys to feel energized and excited about learning this stuff. And classical instruments have such an organic, timeless appeal, in my opinion.
Cutting your images to good music can really get you that extra polished for both narrative and commercial work. For example, observe the following musical interlude. Now everybody wants to know if there are secrets to getting the film look. Okay, let's talk about these secrets. Using sunlight is great and it's free and all, but man...
is it powerful? If you shoot at high noon time frames like 10 a.m to 2 p.m you'll get lighting conditions like this. The lighting is going to be pretty harsh. You'll get high contrast, sharp lines, raccoon eyes. If we switch positions so that the sun is behind the actor this is called shooting against the light or backlighting.
We create a shadow across the entire body which gives us much more controllable consistent light and it creates a rim light which separates the actor from the background. The great thing about backlighting is the exposure stays consistent once you expose for the shadows it doesn't really change much even if the sun gets a little brighter or it's pretty cloudy this doesn't really affect your shadows also when you're shooting into the sunlight or any light for that matter you're definitely going to want to use a lens hood or you'll end up with gnarly lens flares in a milky washed out image unless of course you want the lens flares totally up to you silhouettes a well-placed shot of a silhouette can be very filmic sometimes you don't want to show so much. Sometimes less is more.
Silhouettes can create a lot of emotion and they can be very moody so be very careful how you use them. Just make sure the lighting behind your actor or subject is much brighter than the light in front of them. Shooting actors against the sunsets one classic way to do it.
Note there's a difference between a shot that's under lit and intentionally shooting a silhouette. A silhouette is a stylistic choice not a technical oversight for you youngins out there. Magic hour.
Magic hour is the first hour of the day when the sun is rising and or the last hour just as the sun sets you can get some beautiful lighting at magic hour it's free it's filmic and you see it everywhere planning your exterior day shoots around magic hour when appropriate is one insanely easy way to step up your visuals light baths light baths are dope stick a light right behind your actor or subject and reveal it with a camera move it's not appropriate for everything obvious but it is boss sauce. Depth. You should always look for ways to add depth to your shots. If you're shooting in small apartments, shoot through doorways, pull actors away from the walls when you can. You can move furniture, couches, chairs, and tables if you need to.
While this might not be appropriate for every shot, it definitely makes a huge difference. Closeups. You can make anything look good for cheap in a closeup. If you're short on time, they're much easier to light and faster to shoot. If you don't like some some aspects of your set but you can't control it, you can always go tighter and frame some things out.
Textures and patterns. Textures and patterns look amazing on film. Leathers, furs, tweeds. Did you notice how every time you see a comic book movie, the suits are always made out of different fabrics and some sort of textured material?
That's because it looks dope on camera. If you're thinking of ways to spice up your locations, consider adding patterned wallpaper. They're not too expensive and they're easy to temporarily. hang using carpet tape. Interesting faces.
An interesting face can do wonders for captivating your audience's attention. I've been in situations where I meet someone in life and I don't find anything particularly interesting about them, but the camera sees something completely different. Take an actor like Forest Whitaker for instance. Most would agree he's not a very attractive man.
Sorry. Aside from his amazing acting ability, there's something about him that the camera just can't get enough of. Very photogenic. Camera test everyone. You never know what the camera's gonna see.
Filmic locations. Location scouting is huge. Having a filmic location is like shooting at magic hour. Everywhere you point the camera is just gonna look gorgeous.
If you can get into older houses, they usually tend to be the best. Also, it helps to find a place with lots of windows so you can use natural lighting. Chris- Christmas lights are the best.
You can add a layer of cinematic dreaminess by just adding Christmas lights. They're cheap, they look really good out of focus, and they're really easy to set up. Christmas lights are not something you can throw in every scene, obviously, but it really works when used appropriately.
Transitions. Transitions can really take your work from being just another video to something memorable. Coincidentally, transitions are probably the last thing that most beginners do.
think about. How do you plan to move from one scene to the next? Will you whip pan?
Hard cut fade? Sometimes something as simple as a well placed fade can make all of the difference. If you haven't figured it out by now, basically the secrets to the film look really boil down to what you put in front of the camera. If you've got something photogenic, it's going to look just as good in front of a $200 camera as it would a $20,000 camera. You can get the film look with any camera.
It's all about knowing how to work with the limitations that you have. To prove this, I am going to shoot a short film using my six-year-old Canon 60D, which is terrible in low-light performance. I'm not using Magic Lantern. I'm going to shoot the entire thing with the cheap kit lens. I did an entire video on the limitations of the kit lens, link in the description.
I'm also going to shoot it by myself with absolutely no crew. I'm not going to use any lights. And I'm recording the audio straight into the camera without using a sound recorder.
The big question here is, can we still achieve something filmic with these strict limitations? I don't know. Let's find out.
This one's number seven. Number seven. So, I'm thinking about picking up boxing as my new hobby.
Like seriously? Yeah. Like really? Yeah. You're gonna box some third graders?
I mean, you weigh like five pounds. So you don't think I can do it? I'm just not. You know what? Hey, how about this?
You give slap boxing a try first. Alright, so the first thing you want to do is just bring your hands up. I guess you want to guard your face. Guard those sides.
Like this? Yeah. Watch your shoulders.
Like fists or like open? Open. It's slap boxing.
No closed fists. You're going to be paying attention to your opponent's shoulders. their chest that's gonna tell you which hand they're gonna come with okay you're gonna watch just gonna watch wait for an opening like someone drops that guard a little okay okay let's see if you can dodge a couple more Oh my god, I love this!
Oh, you're kind of quick. This is really fun, Odie! You sure you haven't done this before? I might have to step it up. Come on!
Don't take it easy on me. Better watch out. Okay.
Can you handle me? Come on, bring it! Yeah, yeah!
Yeah, that's what I thought! Hup! Pah!
Pah! Ha! Come on, Odie! Come on!
Oh, that's all you got? Really? That's it?
Yeah, you big tough guy! You're gonna get beat up by your old girl? This girl that beats up the beat layers?
Yeah! Gosh, that was so fun! Thanks for showing me the ropes, Odie! Oh, you're gonna get beat up by your old girl? Yeah!
You're gonna get beat up by your old girl? We should totally do that again sometime. There's that new, um, boxing gym downtown? We should take some classes together. Yeah?
Yeah. Okay, well, see you tomorrow. Bye! This must be how Rihanna felt. I want to die.
You told me the closest you've ever gotten to a real fight was playing Super Street Fighter 4. So how did I lose? How did I get outboxed by a 5'2 blondie from Riverside? What would my dad think if he ever found out?
I could never look him in the eye again. Where I come from, if you didn't slapbox, you didn't eat. And I was the best.
They called me? Shadow hands. Shadow hands.
Hold up. I don't have to take this. I am Shadowhands.
I will rise from the ashes of defeat like a phoenix. I was born for this. It's in my blood.
I welcome the challenge. I live for it. I will get stronger. I will get faster. And I will get sharper.
I can feel it all coming back. It feels good. I know you're out there somewhere, waiting.
From one slapboxer to another, I'm coming for you. And you better be ready. I am not Rihanna and you are not Chris Brown. I am Shadowhands. Shadowhands.
And I've already won. You just don't know it yet. What we do here, just go back, back, back, back, back, back, back.
What you're blocking? You didn't say go yet! No, you should have had your hands up!
You didn't even-Remember when I said I had a six-year-old camera? Let's talk about limitations. First off, if you compare my Canon 60D with a cinema camera like the Canon C300, it just blows it out of the water in terms of sharpness, contrast, dynamic range, everything. My camera pales in comparison. My Canon 60D only shoots 60 frames per second slow motion at 1280 resolution.
I had to blow it up to 1920. Slight resolution loss. Here's an example of the cameras limitation with dynamic range Odie's face is clearly blown out here and the sky in the back this shot this shot this shot this shot and this shot We're all taken at 1600 ISO which is really high for this camera. If you look really close, you can see digital noise all over the place.
I'm shooting in slow motion with a shutter speed of 1.125, so I'm losing a ton of light. The kit lens is all the way open. I can't add lights because I'm not using any, so I had to crank up the ISO. It doesn't look that bad.
I could have picked a different gem with more available light to shoot in, but I really liked the feel of this particular gem. I think the super noisy, underexposed image actually works in our favor here. because it gives the scene a really dirty grimy fight club-esque feeling. When you're shooting 60 frames with this camera you get a lot of moiré.
Moiré is when you see artifacting anywhere where there's tight patterns. You can see it here and here. The newer cameras are much better at handling this.
You can see the variable aperture here. Let's move on to execution. I shot the entire thing as flat as I could and added contrast and color in post. I've added these sexy two 3 5 matte in Premiere. I also added 35 millimeter film grain, dropped the opacity to 50% and overlaid it onto the image.
It actually helps with the noisy shots too so it's a win-win. This is what the audio sounds like when you're recording it right into the camera. So I'm thinking about picking up boxing as my new hobby. And this is what it sounds like denoised. So, I'm thinking about picking up boxing as my new hobby.
I wanted to use guided improv to get really naturalistic performances. You trying to box third graders? You boxing your nieces and nephews on the weekends? What you trying to do, just beat up some little kids in grade school?
So you gonna be in the same weight class as some third graders? In shots like this and this, I gave my actors look space, classic rules of composition. The music you hear in the background was re-recorded with my cell phone to give it a natural sounding reverberation.
You know the music sounds like it's actually coming from some place back in The room, like organically as opposed to like the really unnatural sounding reverb that you get when you do it in post. I went with this light piano musical number during Odie's montage because it reminds me of childlike innocence. His identification as this master slapboxer goes way back to his childhood and that's at stake. I had to go in and do a little bit of ADR.
If you listen to the following clip, you can hear what I'm talking about. Like this. Yeah, yeah, watch this.
Like fists or like open? Open, no, it's slap box. All right, no closed fists. One, both the actors are stepping on each other's lines, and two, we can't really hear Odassus that well. He sounds a little distant, so I had to go through and re-record both of them.
I just went on ahead and did the poor man's- ADR process. Do it more like a kind of like an interrogative writer voice a little bit. Like this, like this, like this. Yeah, yeah, watch your shoulders. Yeah, yeah, watch your shoulders.
I had both the actors say their lines at various tempos and and pacing, dropped it in the edit, and now this is what it sounds like after the ADR has been done. Like this? Yeah. Watch the show.
Like fists or like open? Open. It's slap boxing. No closed fist.
Sounds way better. I wanted to place you guys directly into the fight and the best way to do that was good old fashioned POV. Come on, Odie.
I mean, I shouldn't be trying to hit a woman. Yeah, you big tough guy. I shot it handheld to give the fight a messy, frenetic feeling.
Odie's world spins out of control, so I actually spun the the camera. Dutch angle here to communicate something's not right. The scene is all about how he's taking the loss.
I knew I wanted this in one shot. Central framing here, central framing here, central framing here, central framing here, central framing here. All of these shots are in slow-mo here because narratively speaking, he's deep in thought and unattached to the happenings of the world around him. I recorded all of Odass's voice over with my cell phone. I can feel it all coming back.
It feels good. I recorded some of the Foley using a sound recorder. but most of it using my cell phone. Smokey transitioned to a training montage with a well-placed fade, backlighting Odie directly against the sun because light baths are always dope.
So dope. This shot was actually taken right here in the same room against this window, but because it's clo- You'd never know it. That's the beauty of close-ups classic silhouette against patterned sound blankets on the walls for visual interests I spotted a lamp in the room to backlight Odie. This was shot just after magic hour.
We missed it by a hair Shot it anyway, still looks good. I break composition guidelines here because the shots are supposed to feel dreamlike and abstract. Aperture is wide open to get the super shallow depth of field. These shots were taken in this room against this window to save time.
Of course, you'd never know it because, again, it's a close-up. Backlight Odie against the sun to give him that angelic halo. Nice, slow, well-placed dramatic fade leading us into the last act of the film. The final showdown is slow-motion pans on a tripod. The shots are steady to imply...
why Audacity is now in control, a stark contrast to the handheld messiness of the first fight. I recorded a house fan and layered it into the fight scene at three different speeds to build up tension. Here's the fan slowed down by 50%, regular speed, and 50% faster. Here's the scene without the fans. And then with the fans layered in.
In these shots right here, it was really hard to keep focus as the kit lens has a really small focus throw. Rule of thirds, rule of thirds, booyah. Now, is this the best film I could possibly make?
Of course not. But given the limitations that I placed on myself, I think it came out really, really good. I'm proud of it. I know this was a long video, but I really wanted to show you guys that it's very possible to do a lot with a little. I shot this whole thing for $15.
It would have cost more, but I only filled up my gas tank halfway. The music in the short is from the U- YouTube library and SoundCloud. The biggest secret to getting the film look on a budget is to stop worrying about what you don't have and focus more on technique and story.
It's really that simple. Why don't we try shooting microfilms with... with very simple stories more often so we can really work on our technique and our execution. If you've got really good technique, you can make something very cheap look very expensive. And if you've got a good story, nobody's gonna care what camera you used.
Thank you all so much for watching. I also offer one-on-one video chat sessions for those who are looking for a more personal interaction with their filmmaking questions and concerns. Links for that are also in the description section. Be well, keep hustling.
Deeper doubt.