Cinematography 101: Visual Storytelling Guide & Transcript

[00:00] Cinematography 101. What is cinematography? We love cinema. No matter how much the formats, audiences, and distribution may have changed,

[00:12] we've been telling stories in motion ever since the Mooney Airbothers first brought us this gift. And since that inception, great thinkers have attempted to explain our connection with it. They have said that movies are dreams, that they are windows into worlds and lives that are not our own,

[00:26] that they allow us to sculpt in time. But as poetic as these descriptions are, they don't quite capture the specificity of the art form and our ability to manipulate it.

[00:38] For if this is about the art of visual storytelling, then the heart of cinema is cinematography. Now, cinematography is not only about how we capture the action of the scene, it is how we show that action to the audience.

[00:51] It just means that cinematography is all about communicating with the viewer. but because cinematography is often so beautiful and so emotional it makes us assume that the murky process of filming movies must be built on some murky instinct but instead like all disciplines

[01:07] cinematography is built on principles of concrete understanding because cinema is the language what it sounds so simple but it's like zooming in on the atomic level you get to see how it

[01:20] really works on people Think about it in terms of a language analogy Words have names right Sometimes a few of them But they have clear definitions We have verbs nouns sentence structure These rules are critical to our use of language

[01:33] but also the way we build on them, evolve them, invert them, and use them ironically. The key to understanding is that rules are at the heart of how we speak to each other. And our understanding of cinematography works the exact same way.

[01:46] Now, you may have all these things you want to do and these full-shot ideas and you want to try and mimic or invent, but there are still the basics of cinematic language that must be reckoned with.

[01:59] We must zero in on the specific words and meanings. Embrace the glossary of high angles, low angles, wide lenses, depth of field, color palette. The more we understand the meaning of these words, the better we understand the language of cinema.

[02:12] Like language, you must learn how to speak. Mm-hmm. Yeah, whatever. Say you were filming a scene and wanted to show that someone was really scared. The first tool of cinematic language you would reach for is the high angle. The subject looks down on the victim, cowers low, showing the person in the place of being threatened.

[02:29] Now you could say, oh come on, is this showing a person scared and that's why you think that? But the language of cinema does more than that. It emphasizes. It's not just about the information, aka what's happening on screen, it's the way that information is being shown.

[02:44] The way it evokes emotion and makes it more scary. Aww you guys are amazing The way it goes right past the connection of our brains and dives into our nervous system and it able to do this because it understands perspective to it imagine if you pursued the

[03:02] opposite type say we wanted to no longer be with the monster looking down on the scared human and instead wanted to emphasize with her feelings in that case we would switch to a low angle with

[03:14] her looking up at the monster. Our perspective would be her perspective. The monster would tower over us with menace and violence and make us feel the same way she does. The great thing is we instinctively understand this.

[03:26] These are the kind of things that happen in movies all the time, just with slighter and more subtle emphasis. You think of that famous scene in The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman is being guided around at the party by his parents. They take up the sides of the frame,

[03:39] dominating over him as he shrinks into the lower center. It's the same exact principle as the overt horror movie shots we talked about before, just used in much more subtle context. Yes, I see.

[03:51] Now, cinematography is obviously not a series of mechanical, static angles. Cinema is alive. It moves, and just like with angles, the way the camera moves tells us something, too. The smoothness of a steady cam or a tracking shot instills us with confidence, ease,

[04:06] and an omnipresent God-like ability to go through action with clarity and impunity. A docusyle organic movement makes us feel uneasy like we are witnessing the real world Dutch angles make us feel like the world is off askew So we can use any number of techniques to go beyond the layers of surface

[04:24] and peer in at the people who lay under them, to unfurl the world before us. These tactics reveal the heart of cinematography. Where you put the camera doesn't just allow you to tell the story, it tells you what to think and feel about the story you are watching.

[04:39] We said it before, but cinema is effectively the movie god's view. And sometimes it can seem like this movie god is actively investigating people. Sometimes this movie god is trying to show us something about these people they don't even want to show themselves.

[04:54] Because the god of the movie universe is the storytellers behind the camera. Therefore, it is up to you to decide what you wish to communicate, to emphasize, to make us feel something. You may think that you want your action heroes to be unstoppable cool badasses.

[05:09] but doing so can easily lose the dramatic effect of a fallible hero in danger, making the audience feel that way too. We are going to die!

[05:21] Either way, it's all about what you want to communicate to your audience. Cinema is a language, so it's time you start talking.

[05:39] Thank you.