Ethan Delaney HNC: September 2015

Saturday 26 September 2015

New Wave - Video Planning

Location

St Editha's, Tamworth.

For the majority of my new wave video footage, I wanted to shoot areas of and around Tamworth, Staffordshire. Due to many recent occasions of travelling to Tamworth from Nuneaton to visit friends, I have become very familiar with a lot of its scenery. A few months prior to eventually shooting the film, I had taken various images of potential locations in the town where I could shoot footage. These can be seen bellow;

Potential locations scouted.

All of these images were taken around River Anker: of which runs through the centre of Tamworth. As per many of the new wave films I have recently viewed in preparation of creating my own, the use of none-staged/setup lighting i.e. lighting that's already a part of the location, was desired and so these locations seemed to be ideal. The yellow street lights
near Tamworth skate park, (whereby the majority of the film is based) reminded me of the unnerving, sickness-inducing cinematography in Denis Villeneuve's film Enemy.

The final video was intended to be an almost montage of shots showing a late-night exploration of a largely deserted Tamworth. To achieve a distortion of time thought id be useful to include a time-lapse shot.

Wednesday 23 September 2015

ISO

ISO
ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is the software setting on a camera that will dictate how sensitive your camera's sensor is to light. Increasing the ISO will result in a brighter picture, however it also has an unfortunate drawback of creating more noise in an image. The amount of noise desired in an image can be a preference of choice as this can on the other hand make an image appear more like traditional grainy film photography.

The following videos are experiments with shooting both 1600 and 3200 ISO DSLR video at night. The results were, on a whole, underexposed whilst using both ISO values due to the lack of intensity in the lighting. In order to get around this my first thought was to adjust the aperture and shutter speed. However, I could not reduce the shutter speed bellow 1/50 as this is the minimum necessary to capture video at 24fps without noticeable motion blur. With the opportunity to shoot again I would try to find a lighter area to shoot or perhaps introduce my own lighting setup. Due to the low key lighting, the auto-focus could not be utilised to its potential and hence manual focus had to be used instead.

Shoot Location: "The Green" Maple Park, Nuneaton, UK.

Technical Specs:

Equipment: Canon EOS 600D, Canon Zoom Lens

Frames Per Second: 24

Aspect Ratio: 16:9

Definition: 1080p

ISO 1600 Test 1
ISO 1600 Test 1 from Ethan Delaney on Vimeo.

Process:

Camera position: The camera was positioned approximately 40cm from my characters bike at a low angle.

ISO: 1600

Shutter Speed: 1/50

Aperture: 4.5

Strengths: The silhouette created with the street lamp's illumination of my figure. Continuous lighting tone throughout. The fixed lighting that allowed the character to be unseen on the footage as he draws further away from the camera.

Weaknesses: Underexposure due to the lack of intensity of the street lamps and limitations of my camera equipment. Digital noise in the imagery caused by the increased ISO. The focus of the footagedoes not follow the character as he rides off.

Problem Solving: In order to solve the problem of underexposure I could use a Power LED light source which would provide more intensity onto the figure to be picked up by the camera sensor. However this lighting source offers a natural tone, as opposed to the orange tone of the street lamps. In order to remove this difference in tone, I could use a lens or digital filter. I could prevent the figure from being off-focus by using Magic Lantern software that would better indicate which part of the frame is in focus at all times.

Improvements: Use a lens/digital filter to ensure the lighting tone is the same. Use Magic Lantern to ensure the figure is in focus at all times. Camera movement could be intercooporated with the use of a steadicam device or perhaps a track for the camera to move along and track the bike.

ISO 3200 Test 2

ISO 3200 Test 2 from Ethan Delaney on Vimeo.

Process:

Camera position: The camera was positioned approximately 50cm from my characters face at a low angle.

ISO: 3200

Shutter Speed: 1/50

Aperture: 4.5

Strengths: The silhouette created with the street lamp's illumination of my figure. The movement of my camera which allowed the camera to capture the chiaroscuro on my characters face with adds a sense of uncertainty. Continuous lighting tone throughout.

Problem Solving: In order to solve the problem of underexposure I could use a Power LED light source which would provide more intensity onto the figures face to be picked up by the camera sensor. However this lighting source offers a natural tone, as opposed to the orange tone of the street lamps. In order to remove this difference in tone, I could use a lens or digital filter. I could prevent the figure from being off-focus by using Magic Lantern software that would better indicate which part of the frame is in focus at all times.

Improvements: Use a lens/digital filter to ensure the lighting tone is the same. Use Magic Lantern to ensure the figure is in focus at all times. I could incorporate a quick zoom to a close-up of my characters face as he turns around for added dramatic intensity to the scene.

ISO 3200 Test 1

ISO 3200 Test 1 from Ethan Delaney on Vimeo.

Process:

Camera position: The camera was positioned approximately 120cm from my characters bike at a high angle.

ISO: 3200

Shutter Speed: 1/50

Aperture: 4.5

Strengths: Continuous lighting tone throughout. The character is consistantly in focus. The shadow of the camera operator (me) is never shown on the screen.

Weaknesses: Underexposure due to the lack of intensity of the street lamps and limitations of my camera equipment. Digital noise in the imagery caused by the increased ISO.

Wednesday 16 September 2015

The effects of Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO on moving image

Aperture
A change in the aperture effects the amount of light that is received by the sensor and therefore the amount of light within a still image. To adjust the amount of light in an image, say perhaps a scene is too dark, opening/increasing the aperture will result in a brighter scene. Doubling the aperture quadruples the exposure. Aperture sizes are measured in f-stops (the size of the aperture reduces the depth of field). There is another factor that will effect the amount of light let into the image: the lens. A larger aperture is needed for a 100 mm lens and hence a smaller one is needed for a 50 mm lens for example to achieve the same result.

Shutter Speed
The shutter is like a small curtain in a camera. It quickly passes over the image sensor and thus only allows light to enter and be absorbed by the sensor for fractions of a second. The faster the shutter passes over, the dark the resulting image. Therefore a lighter image can be created by reducing the shutter speed. A shutter speed of 1/20 of a second for example, will allow more light into the sensor than a shutter speed of 1/40. The shutter in a digital camera is also primarily responsible for effecting the amount of blur in moving imagery. By increasing the shutter speed, the image is being taken so fast that the object in movement has travelled less distance for any blur to be noticeable in a picture.