Using Your Camera to Tell Your Story
“It’s more than writing a sad story, the camera can add a huge amount of power to your words.”
Cameras are this interesting thing that directors either know a lot about or find terrifying! But no matter what type of director you are, when it comes to understanding certain elements of the camera, it’s best to be well versed. Ultimately, understanding your camera will make you a better storyteller because you fully understand the tool with which your story is being recorded.
Before film, I started out as a photographer, I took pictures of pretty much everything and it taught me how to use a camera but not so much how to tell a story. So when I started to make videos I would quite often commit one of the worst sins in film — choosing images and angles based on how cool they looked. It wasn’t until later in my career that I came to understand how incredibly powerful each aspect of the camera was in manipulating the way the audience received my characters and my story.
The first thing I decided to tackle — you’ve probably heard of it and most likely used it subconsciously already– is depth of field. As commonplace understanding goes, the shallower the depth of field, the more cinematic your shot will look. Generally, this is correct. The shallower your depth of field, the more you will separate your subject from its background and foreground. In turn, this helps to direct the audience's focus to where you want it to be.
However, depth of field can be used in a multitude of ways. For instance, let’s say we have a character who’s very emotional at a particular point in your film. They’re on the verge of crying because of a traumatic event. So we, as the director, decide to do a close-up right on their eyes so we can see the emotion. While doing this, we have three options: use an incredibly shallow depth of field, a medium depth of field, or a very deep depth of field.
Each of the images makes the audience feel differently about the character. By shifting the background and foreground out of focus (shallow depth of field), our eyes are drawn to the character, yet by doing so, we also make the character feel separate from their surroundings. They seem more internal; they’re introspective and pensive.
So if a shallow depth of field piques our interest as to what the character is thinking, the medium depth of field, however, starts the connect the character more to their surroundings. This means they could be listening to someone else intently or reacting to events around them.
The widest depth of field is a bit different. This is where we bring the majority of the space around the character into focus, which leads us to understand that this character is aware of the environment around them — this is especially useful in action films where the character is acutely aware of their surroundings, they could also be moving quickly making shallow focus all but impossible.
No matter which option you choose, remember that along with a cool image, depth of field can really highlight the emotionality within your story.
One of the most difficult areas for me to understand has always been focal length. By this I mean, is the shot wide, or is it really close, and how does that affect the look of my subject, and subsequently the look of my foreground and background?
Early on, what I gathered was: the longer the lens, the less background I saw in my image, and the wider the lens generally, the more background to be seen. This can be used in a multitude of ways. Let’s say you’ve got a character running through a park, and you’ve got three options: a long lens, a medium lens, and a very wide lens. Even though it’s the same acting, action, and environment we can get three different feelings by using different focal lengths.
With a wide shot, we feel like the character appears to be isolated in the space that they are running through. We get a sense of how alone and separate they are from the rest of the world because there is no other character within the frame.
Whereas in the medium shot, we get a sense of the body and the physicality of the running, it gives us a slightly more personal view with a little less background and foreground. This is particularly effective when we’re trying to show how and why a character is moving through a particular space (i.e. chase sequences and fight sequences).
Finally, we’ve got the long shot which makes us feel like the camera is much further away from the character than it is. This provides distance from the character. It makes us feel like we’re looking in on them. This can be incredibly useful in spy movies or if someone is being watched from afar. Additionally, if we wanted to keep the size of the subject the same, we can achieve that by selecting a longer lens while moving the camera further away. By utilizing these techniques, you’ll be able to see just how much of the surroundings change when we look at our character.
For those very familiar with cameras, you might be wondering about shutter speed or shutter angle. Both deal with how long the shutter is open for, or on digital cameras how much time, during a single frame, the sensor will recording light. Many of you probably already use the rule: when filming you use twice the shutter speed of your frame rate. So, if you have 24 frames per second, following the cinematic standard, you would choose a shutter speed of 1/48 of a second. Luckily, most cameras these days have the option to change the readout to show the shutter angle rather than the speed. However, the shutter angle is slightly different, it gives you 0 to 360 degrees which may alter how you think about your shutter speed.
Back when film cameras were the main cinematic powerhouse, they would use the shutter angle. A camera would have a disc that sat in front of the film and as new film was loaded behind the lens, the disc would spin, this disc would be open on one side and closed on the other. Thus as it rotated, a portion of it would be in front of the film, blocking light, until it came out of the way.
Cinematographers would therefore choose different discs with various amounts of the disc blocked and open, which was defined by the angle out open area on the disc. For instance, if half of the disc was blocked and the other half open — that’s a 180-degree shutter angle.
Shutter angle offers a great deal of flexibility. For those who’ve come from photography, you probably already know that the higher your shutter speed the less motion blur you get. That’s standard in photography, but how does that affect our image in film?
A great example of shutter angle is the beginning of Tony Scott’s The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009). Scott utilizes a technique known as “undercranking” (capturing fewer frames per second for a sporadic or jerked effect) to display a montage of trains, railways, and cityscapes. He intentionally pairs undercranking with a low shutter speed to let light in over a long period of time. This creates a blurry dreamlike image that introduces the audience to the soul of the film rather than heavy details. Scott successfully uses shutter angle to convey emotion over information, a clear and effective cinematic choice.
Thinking about the style, the characters, their journeys, and the emotional state of the audience will guide you towards cinematic and stylized choices. They will enable you to decide how to prepare your camera for depth of field, focal length, and shutter angle/speed-critical things to consider when exploring the underbelly of your film.
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