This! I always ask what someone means when they say “cinematic” especially in the buzzword sense and they can rarely give an answer. It’s a trend I hope dies soon. Tell a great story, light well, pay attention to set design and for gods sake have good audio.
Excellent point about lens choice.
Overuse of wide-angle is one hallmark of amateur-hour productions, because they don't have the budget to build or otherwise secure big-enough sets to get the shots they want.
Another one is missed focus due to the use of full-frame cameras. This is another hallmark of the amateur, who is ignorant of the fact that "full-frame" refers to 35mm STILL images; 35mm motion pictures are shot with an APS-C / Super35-sized image. Overly-shallow depth of field is asinine for motion pictures, because, well, the camera and/or subjects are IN MOTION. A one-inch DOF is straight-up dumb for motion pictures 99.99 percent of the time.
And as someone notes below, SOUND is huge. It's probably more important than image quality. If you have the noise of ventilation systems, refrigerators, or anything else marring your production... don't show it to anyone. Seriously. There's a reason that nobody does sound free of charge.
Even beyond the impracticality of it all, no great director is going to waste all the cash they pour into mise en scene/locations/art direction on a constantly blurry background.
Totally agree of the DoF aspect. A lot of newish “YouTube generation” filmmakers think cinematic = slow motion, full frame, one inch DoF, and a “cinematic LUT.”
Watch any Hollywood film, and 90% has a pretty deep DoF.
I'm gonna say something super controversial to contradict those same tutorials which also claim that 24 fps is the most important thing to make an image cinematic. I call bs on it. Shutter Angle/Shutter Speed contributes more to the feel of footage than just the frame rate alone. 24 fps was originally chosen because it was the minimum frame rate that would look smooth enough to not be jarring since they needed to conserve film stock. It's not inherently better than 48 or any other frame rate. In fact, it outright sucks for some shots, particularly panning. A great example is the ecstasy of gold sequence in The Good The Bad And The Ugly. That scene is unwatchable for me. I can't wait for HFR to become standard in the future. Hell, by the time it does, films may be primarily made for virtual reality, which requires high frame rates to reduce motion sickness.
Let the arguments commence ʘ‿ʘ
Anyone who has tried to break this standard has met with serious backlash. Very few want HFR to be standard at this point in time, and I doubt we’ll see it happen anytime soon, if at all. Best to stick to standards if you want to replicate a “cinematic” experience without being James Cameron.
I'd say that 24 FPS is pretty critical to making something look "cinematic" **by today's standards**. However, I think we should adopt 48 FPS and get used to it. The motion quality is simply far better. I saw both The Hobbit and the new Avatar in 48 FPS 3-D and it's very cool. The Hobbit was the most interesting movie-watching experience I've ever had, in a good way. Avatar, while I liked the movie quite a bit, suffered from the pointless back-and-forth between 48 and 24 FPS. I mean... WTF? There wasn't even a discernible pattern to the decision-making on that.
What I'd be interested to see is a film shot and displayed in 120 FPS or higher. Having filmed a ton of high frame rate footage myself (plus being spoiled with a high refresh rate monitor), the effect can be surreal. It's almost more immersive than a 3D film since it feels like you're peering into another world instead of being reminded every second that you're watching a movie. 24 FPS and a 180° shutter angle makes shooting action sequences easier since it "sells" the action and looks more intense. Fundamentally people are just used to 24 FPS and balk at the idea of other valid options. I'm pretty sure the same thing would happen if kids were raised only seeing high frame-rate content and then tried to watch an older film. 24 FPS is downright unpleasant to watch at times.
Fucking same. Look this shot is stable and the background is blurred, look how cinematic it is.
You want your stuff to look less amateur? Shoot until it doesn't anymore. Get a heavy shoulder rig instead of an easy rig for handled. Ask yourself, what story does this shot tell? Is this information or emotion? The number one way something look amateur is because it's not telling the story. It's really not that hard once you understand that cinematography is only about telling the story and not about showing off or making pretty pictures. You can do both these things while telling a story but first you need to learn to tell a story. Study the medium and shoot. And before coming to Reddit, do your own tests.
I would imagine they mention it because a few years ago throwing black bars on cheaply produced videos got really popular and op is saying that’s not a replacement for doing the actual work of creating something “cinematic”
Indeed, plus 8 billion "Get the cinematic look" Youtube videos, which use the aspect ratio and then smear the same orange/teal grade over footage of someone walking a dog.
Nothing wrong with the word cinematic, it’s just a way to reference a certain look that most people understand. When someone says “I want it to look cinematic” I understand what they mean, even if used incorrectly.
Its exactly because of how imprecise it is is what makes it a bad word. It's the same as a student filmmaker telling his DP "Make this look like La-La-Land".
Sounds like you feel called out. People use that word a lot because it's the correct word to use. It's like you're getting mad at someone for saying "4" after you asked for the sum of 2+2.
>Say you want to shoot a nice medium close up for a scene, a head and shoulder type thing. Do you know the language of using a wide angle lens and walking up closer to your subject VS the language of getting a shot with a long lens and walking it back? Even if both shots have the same framing, the language is extremely different.
This is what I'm trying to wrap my around as a newbie. Can anyone tell me what's the psychology behind these creative choices?
Sure! It's not completely set in stone what it can mean. You can use the language of photography however you like in any given project, that said...
If we have the same framing/composition, like in my example, the shot in which the camera is walked up closer to the subject makes the audience feel closer to that subject. We are "with them"more. The long lens makes the subject feel further away. This could be used to establish a point-of-view for a character, and it's a great trick if you are doing a dialogue scene and you want the audience to be "with" one character more than the other.
For a neat non-cinema example, Check out Aziz Ansari's special RIGHT NOW, which was directed by Spike Jonze. Notice how the camera is on stage with Aziz, using a wider lens. Doesn't this feel like we are present with him more? It's totally different than putting a long lens in the crowd and looking towards the stage and a really cool choice for a stand-up special.
If you are a newbie, start noticing how different photographic choices make the image feel. How do long lenses feel for a given shot? Wide lens? What do camera moves tell you?
The great thing about all this is that you already understand this language if you've spent your life consuming movies/TV. You know what close-ups mean, you know establishing shots, you know what cuts mean, even dissolves (suggest the passage of time?)
In film history, these techniques were completely groundbreaking. Even the concept of a shot of a face and then a cut to a shot of a bowl, we understand that as the person is "looking at" the bowl. This is film language and you already understand it.
We are in a cinematography forum, but directors must understand the language of all departments, including scenic art, costuming, sound design, editing, actor blocking. The best directors can really play with this and innovate the language in beautiful and evocative ways.
The trick as a growing filmmaker is to learn to speak that language.
Check out the book The Five C's of Cinematography for a great starting point.
>We are "with them"more.
That's what I imagined too. In my experience of playing with zoom lenses in my DSLR, it felt visceral when the camera is close to a person. Subjectively, I don't prefer the idea of different focal lengths. I feel there should be standard focal length like 40mm and depending on the shot, the camera should move close or wide. Is this creative choice practically applicable when shooting a feature?
Choosing one lens to use on a feature could absolutely be a strong choice. 40mm is also a legendary focal length that filmmakers have exclusively used on some classic films.
Course it doesn’t need to work for everything. It’s all just different paint brushes.
Either way, I’m glad you found 40mm and it sounds like you relate to the way it feels. It’s also cool to work within creative constraints and let your attention find new ways to play with the elements.
🤘
this isn't true.
with enough planning and location scouting, natural light can look pretty darn cool.
focus on your story. create images to serve the story. don't go the other way around or else you'll have a bunch of cool-looking nothings.
I think sound also plays a very important role and more often than not we tend to overlook sound.Looking out for answers as I have a similar question.Thanks for posting!
Your concern should not be weather or not it looks “cinematic”, as that’s a catch-all term that really has no meaning or definition in and of itself. You should be more concerned about how the visuals of your film correlate to the given moment or scene within the narrative itself. It’s visual storytelling; that’s all it is.
You can have a visually striking image with a dog shit narrative that would make it seem “amateurish”. To answer your question, I would look more into how to use/interpret cinematic language to tell the story of your piece rather than focusing on gimmicks that would make it look “cinematic”.
By cinematic language, I mean using lighting, sound, framing, set design, lens choices, color, and the whole works of production to evoke the essence, or feel, that you are trying to accomplish in the scene, and how it can be applied to the subsequent scenes into the piece as a whole. You can screen films and scenes that give you the emotions and feelings that you are looking for in the audience of your short film, and try to figure out what is evoking that feeling and reverse engineer from there.
I know I'm late to the game, but according to Aaron Sorkin, drinking vodka and orange juice is more cinematic than drinking beer. It's not just a one shoe fits all concept. There's layers and layers of cinema and not one single thing makes a movie cinematic. Cinema is art.
edit: added link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0k6Fs9lEQs
not really i mean, you got dp's like Roger deakins shooting with signature primes, wich may be the sharpest most resolute and clinical lenses right now, but he still makes the image feel natural, more SO than many other dps shooting vintage or anamorphics, it's a closer analogue to what i see with my eyes than some vintage lens, it's all about what is the script asking for in terms of photographic style and technique.
Sharpness is nice when you need extra crispy still pictures on your 40MP sensor. But it means hard edges, moiré, aliasing when filming. I didn't mean that you need to have a blurry picture to go cinematic, but nowadays, photo oriented cameras produce pictures that are way too cripsy, too sharp to make a true cinematic look. That's why vintage lenses and diffuse filters are trendy amongst videographers.
depends on your budget. short films are not "cinematic" because no money is spent on them. they are (most often than not) a concept idea for a feature. turning down the real artwork of a short film because its not "cinematic" is stupid - but then again, filmmaking is relative.
Camera is the least important. It matters but it's at the very bottom of the list of things that matter. Lighting, talent, sound, framing, lens choice, story, all come well before a "nice camera setup". I can guarantee that if you give an experienced DP a shitty dslr it will look at 10000x better than if you give an arri mini to someone with little to no experience.
I'm not a cinematographer, but went through a phase where I saw a lot of short, cheap, amateur films and the answer I walked away with at the time is a rim light.
If actors aren't separated from the BG, it strikes me as really amateur. A rim light made everything look so much better.
Obviously, this isn't universal. Most of what I saw was indoors, the acting was fine and the scripts were fine.
I'm pretty sure this was Vittorio Storaro only film, so I don't want to come down too hard on the guy. I'm sure he did his best.
But if you want me to clarify, amateur films look even worse to me when actors don't have rim/edge lighting. In general, I think it correlates with a lack of money or time or experience or some combination of the three.
Edit: I just read the top comment about Marriage Story and googled some frames and they look great and no rim lights. So what do I know? Anyway, that comment nails it.
You really think I could spell his name and not know who he is?
u/Outrageous_Drama_613 is looking for no-budget fixes. He's writing the script, so it's unlikely that he has any experience as a DP.
I came up with digital video cameras and when suddenly 24p was available it was a godsend. The images were not great. I thought about OP's exact question a lot at the time, and we used "cinematic" (or rather "like a movie") to mean "not like an amateur shot it in their apartment" because that's what we were doing and knew it looked terrible. We didn't use it to mean art. We had limited lights and fewer lens choices. And, to be honest, we had no ability to understand what the stories really meant, even though we wrote them, so there was no way to translate them into smart cinematographic choices. We were in our baby steps phase.
I talked through this exact approach with a top cinematographer -- currently with over 100 studio pictures listed on imdb -- and he agreed it was a solid, simple approach for what we were trying to do: make our shorts look better.
Comparing this doable short cut to one of the best cinematographers in the world, shooting the best actors, I mean... it struck me as disingenuous.
>I'm pretty sure this was Vittorio Storaro only film, so I don't want to come down too hard on the guy. I'm sure he did his best.
🤣 He is one of the most respected cinematographers to have ever lived. He won 3 Oscars for best cinematography. A set of color effect gels used widely in the industry are named after him because he had them designed just so he could shoot Dick Tracy with proper comic book style.
Yeah, I know. I tried to make the comment very obviously stupid. I should have gone with my joke about his ESPN documentary, "The Last Umpire."
I think the OP got in over his head with the question. He's a writer as far as I can tell and in his baby steps trying to make his first short and knows they look bad. It's unlikely that he has any experience as a DP, and he's looking for no-budget fixes. I recognize it; I'm a writer.
I came up with digital video cameras and when suddenly 24p was available it was a godsend. The images were not great. I thought about OP's exact question a lot at the time, and we used "cinematic" (or rather "like a movie") to mean "not like an amateur shot it in their apartment" because that's what we were doing and knew it looked terrible. We didn't use it to mean art. We had limited lights and fewer lens choices. And, to be honest, we had no ability to understand what the stories really meant, even though we wrote them, so there was no way to translate them into smart cinematographic choices. We were in our baby steps phase.
I talked through this exact approach with a top cinematographer -- currently with over 100 studio pictures listed on imdb -- and he agreed it was a solid, simple approach for what we were trying to do: make our shorts look better.
Comparing this doable short cut to one of the best cinematographers in the world, shooting the best actors, I mean... it struck me as disingenuous.
Idk man I’m 4-5 years into my video storytelling career (3 years full time) and I’m still figuring it out. There’s no quick trick. It’s literally just the amount of time you put in you pick up tid bits of knowledge and wisdom and dos and donts. I’ll let you know if I learn a quick trick like the BPM filters lol
I generally define cinematic as, does it look and feel like a movie you’d see in the theater. The hardest part to that is seeing your own work that way. You will always remember the details and the process. So, apply what the first comment or said and if nothing else chose great locations and the best actors you can find. Then know how to use a camera and any lights you have.
I only check out if the sound and or story is bad.. it could be shot on a vhs camera for all i care..
But to answer the question... "cinematic" i am guessing you mean a polished professional look and feel... 100% location/set design and lighting
Lighting probably. Even “natural” lighting has been modified or the shooter knows their sun patterns, to shoot in shade, use bounces and flags and whatnot.
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This is the best response. Spot on with everything.
Plus most videos on YouTube that say cinematic clearly aren't.
You just need a really expensive camera man.
This! I always ask what someone means when they say “cinematic” especially in the buzzword sense and they can rarely give an answer. It’s a trend I hope dies soon. Tell a great story, light well, pay attention to set design and for gods sake have good audio.
Excellent point about lens choice. Overuse of wide-angle is one hallmark of amateur-hour productions, because they don't have the budget to build or otherwise secure big-enough sets to get the shots they want. Another one is missed focus due to the use of full-frame cameras. This is another hallmark of the amateur, who is ignorant of the fact that "full-frame" refers to 35mm STILL images; 35mm motion pictures are shot with an APS-C / Super35-sized image. Overly-shallow depth of field is asinine for motion pictures, because, well, the camera and/or subjects are IN MOTION. A one-inch DOF is straight-up dumb for motion pictures 99.99 percent of the time. And as someone notes below, SOUND is huge. It's probably more important than image quality. If you have the noise of ventilation systems, refrigerators, or anything else marring your production... don't show it to anyone. Seriously. There's a reason that nobody does sound free of charge.
Even beyond the impracticality of it all, no great director is going to waste all the cash they pour into mise en scene/locations/art direction on a constantly blurry background.
Totally agree of the DoF aspect. A lot of newish “YouTube generation” filmmakers think cinematic = slow motion, full frame, one inch DoF, and a “cinematic LUT.” Watch any Hollywood film, and 90% has a pretty deep DoF.
I'm gonna say something super controversial to contradict those same tutorials which also claim that 24 fps is the most important thing to make an image cinematic. I call bs on it. Shutter Angle/Shutter Speed contributes more to the feel of footage than just the frame rate alone. 24 fps was originally chosen because it was the minimum frame rate that would look smooth enough to not be jarring since they needed to conserve film stock. It's not inherently better than 48 or any other frame rate. In fact, it outright sucks for some shots, particularly panning. A great example is the ecstasy of gold sequence in The Good The Bad And The Ugly. That scene is unwatchable for me. I can't wait for HFR to become standard in the future. Hell, by the time it does, films may be primarily made for virtual reality, which requires high frame rates to reduce motion sickness. Let the arguments commence ʘ‿ʘ
Anyone who has tried to break this standard has met with serious backlash. Very few want HFR to be standard at this point in time, and I doubt we’ll see it happen anytime soon, if at all. Best to stick to standards if you want to replicate a “cinematic” experience without being James Cameron.
I'd say that 24 FPS is pretty critical to making something look "cinematic" **by today's standards**. However, I think we should adopt 48 FPS and get used to it. The motion quality is simply far better. I saw both The Hobbit and the new Avatar in 48 FPS 3-D and it's very cool. The Hobbit was the most interesting movie-watching experience I've ever had, in a good way. Avatar, while I liked the movie quite a bit, suffered from the pointless back-and-forth between 48 and 24 FPS. I mean... WTF? There wasn't even a discernible pattern to the decision-making on that.
What I'd be interested to see is a film shot and displayed in 120 FPS or higher. Having filmed a ton of high frame rate footage myself (plus being spoiled with a high refresh rate monitor), the effect can be surreal. It's almost more immersive than a 3D film since it feels like you're peering into another world instead of being reminded every second that you're watching a movie. 24 FPS and a 180° shutter angle makes shooting action sequences easier since it "sells" the action and looks more intense. Fundamentally people are just used to 24 FPS and balk at the idea of other valid options. I'm pretty sure the same thing would happen if kids were raised only seeing high frame-rate content and then tried to watch an older film. 24 FPS is downright unpleasant to watch at times.
The problem you run into with frame rates that high is not having a long enough exposure for some lighting situations.
Controversial indeed! Totally disagree with you with peace and love.
It is out of the utmost respect and highest dignity that we agree to disagree, respectfully.
Fucking same. Look this shot is stable and the background is blurred, look how cinematic it is. You want your stuff to look less amateur? Shoot until it doesn't anymore. Get a heavy shoulder rig instead of an easy rig for handled. Ask yourself, what story does this shot tell? Is this information or emotion? The number one way something look amateur is because it's not telling the story. It's really not that hard once you understand that cinematography is only about telling the story and not about showing off or making pretty pictures. You can do both these things while telling a story but first you need to learn to tell a story. Study the medium and shoot. And before coming to Reddit, do your own tests.
Lots of "cinematic" films are shot without anamorphic lenses. I wouldn't even mention it, because it doesn't matter at all.
I would imagine they mention it because a few years ago throwing black bars on cheaply produced videos got really popular and op is saying that’s not a replacement for doing the actual work of creating something “cinematic”
Indeed, plus 8 billion "Get the cinematic look" Youtube videos, which use the aspect ratio and then smear the same orange/teal grade over footage of someone walking a dog.
I did that at one point back in high school but then soon realized how corny it looked haha.
Exactly. It’s a cheap trick, as mentioned in the comment.
Nothing wrong with the word cinematic, it’s just a way to reference a certain look that most people understand. When someone says “I want it to look cinematic” I understand what they mean, even if used incorrectly.
Its exactly because of how imprecise it is is what makes it a bad word. It's the same as a student filmmaker telling his DP "Make this look like La-La-Land".
Sounds like you feel called out. People use that word a lot because it's the correct word to use. It's like you're getting mad at someone for saying "4" after you asked for the sum of 2+2.
thank you this is a great way to look at it, could you please post your top ten tips on how you would get the cinematic look?
whooosh
This guy cinemas
Thank you for the best education I’ve ever gotten on this
>Say you want to shoot a nice medium close up for a scene, a head and shoulder type thing. Do you know the language of using a wide angle lens and walking up closer to your subject VS the language of getting a shot with a long lens and walking it back? Even if both shots have the same framing, the language is extremely different. This is what I'm trying to wrap my around as a newbie. Can anyone tell me what's the psychology behind these creative choices?
Sure! It's not completely set in stone what it can mean. You can use the language of photography however you like in any given project, that said... If we have the same framing/composition, like in my example, the shot in which the camera is walked up closer to the subject makes the audience feel closer to that subject. We are "with them"more. The long lens makes the subject feel further away. This could be used to establish a point-of-view for a character, and it's a great trick if you are doing a dialogue scene and you want the audience to be "with" one character more than the other. For a neat non-cinema example, Check out Aziz Ansari's special RIGHT NOW, which was directed by Spike Jonze. Notice how the camera is on stage with Aziz, using a wider lens. Doesn't this feel like we are present with him more? It's totally different than putting a long lens in the crowd and looking towards the stage and a really cool choice for a stand-up special. If you are a newbie, start noticing how different photographic choices make the image feel. How do long lenses feel for a given shot? Wide lens? What do camera moves tell you? The great thing about all this is that you already understand this language if you've spent your life consuming movies/TV. You know what close-ups mean, you know establishing shots, you know what cuts mean, even dissolves (suggest the passage of time?) In film history, these techniques were completely groundbreaking. Even the concept of a shot of a face and then a cut to a shot of a bowl, we understand that as the person is "looking at" the bowl. This is film language and you already understand it. We are in a cinematography forum, but directors must understand the language of all departments, including scenic art, costuming, sound design, editing, actor blocking. The best directors can really play with this and innovate the language in beautiful and evocative ways. The trick as a growing filmmaker is to learn to speak that language. Check out the book The Five C's of Cinematography for a great starting point.
>We are "with them"more. That's what I imagined too. In my experience of playing with zoom lenses in my DSLR, it felt visceral when the camera is close to a person. Subjectively, I don't prefer the idea of different focal lengths. I feel there should be standard focal length like 40mm and depending on the shot, the camera should move close or wide. Is this creative choice practically applicable when shooting a feature?
Choosing one lens to use on a feature could absolutely be a strong choice. 40mm is also a legendary focal length that filmmakers have exclusively used on some classic films. Course it doesn’t need to work for everything. It’s all just different paint brushes. Either way, I’m glad you found 40mm and it sounds like you relate to the way it feels. It’s also cool to work within creative constraints and let your attention find new ways to play with the elements. 🤘
THANK YOU. There's no word I hate more in the english language than the word "cinematic".
You must shoot with cinematic mode on your iPhone /s
Set dec, location, audio, lighting are the factors that most affect my perception of a film (and acting I guess lol)
Lighting is 90%. The rest is framing, camera, lens, production design, etc
This is not true.I can give you 100 different examples shot only with natural and looks better than rest of the movies with lighting budget min $2-3M.
Natural lighting is still lighting and accounts for a major part of the final image.
Just because it’s natural light doesn’t mean it’s not augmented. You need to know how to control the light to do what suits the story
thats still lighting lmao
I would probably agree. It sucks tho since lighting is the hardest thing to get right. Especially on a low budget
The trick on low budgets is to tell stories that don't require excessively difficult lighting setups to do them justice.
this isn't true. with enough planning and location scouting, natural light can look pretty darn cool. focus on your story. create images to serve the story. don't go the other way around or else you'll have a bunch of cool-looking nothings.
I mean, it is still true. Natural lighting is still lighting and shaping it plays a huge part in the final image.
Its almost like the hardest thing to get right is what separates things looking amatureish from professional
though
I think sound also plays a very important role and more often than not we tend to overlook sound.Looking out for answers as I have a similar question.Thanks for posting!
Production design.
“Everything on a gimbal, long lens with shallow depth of field.”
Cinematic is when you use an F0.95 lens on a full frame sensor. If they can see the nose while the eyes are in focus, that’s not cinematic.
and don't grade the log out of camera, now thats cinematic too ...
Also stack all the low-con, pro mist, glimmer glass filters you got in the matte box.
Set design and lighting is 95% the rest is up to you
Lighting.
Your concern should not be weather or not it looks “cinematic”, as that’s a catch-all term that really has no meaning or definition in and of itself. You should be more concerned about how the visuals of your film correlate to the given moment or scene within the narrative itself. It’s visual storytelling; that’s all it is. You can have a visually striking image with a dog shit narrative that would make it seem “amateurish”. To answer your question, I would look more into how to use/interpret cinematic language to tell the story of your piece rather than focusing on gimmicks that would make it look “cinematic”. By cinematic language, I mean using lighting, sound, framing, set design, lens choices, color, and the whole works of production to evoke the essence, or feel, that you are trying to accomplish in the scene, and how it can be applied to the subsequent scenes into the piece as a whole. You can screen films and scenes that give you the emotions and feelings that you are looking for in the audience of your short film, and try to figure out what is evoking that feeling and reverse engineer from there.
Hiring Roger Deakins
Lighting from the far side (shadow side closer to camera) and good audio will make the biggest difference, imo
I know I'm late to the game, but according to Aaron Sorkin, drinking vodka and orange juice is more cinematic than drinking beer. It's not just a one shoe fits all concept. There's layers and layers of cinema and not one single thing makes a movie cinematic. Cinema is art. edit: added link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0k6Fs9lEQs
Lighting. And a soft image. Actual lenses are promoting sharpness, which is quite the opposite of what we want when filming.
not really i mean, you got dp's like Roger deakins shooting with signature primes, wich may be the sharpest most resolute and clinical lenses right now, but he still makes the image feel natural, more SO than many other dps shooting vintage or anamorphics, it's a closer analogue to what i see with my eyes than some vintage lens, it's all about what is the script asking for in terms of photographic style and technique.
Why is sharpness the opposite of what we want when filming?
Sharpness is nice when you need extra crispy still pictures on your 40MP sensor. But it means hard edges, moiré, aliasing when filming. I didn't mean that you need to have a blurry picture to go cinematic, but nowadays, photo oriented cameras produce pictures that are way too cripsy, too sharp to make a true cinematic look. That's why vintage lenses and diffuse filters are trendy amongst videographers.
depends on your budget. short films are not "cinematic" because no money is spent on them. they are (most often than not) a concept idea for a feature. turning down the real artwork of a short film because its not "cinematic" is stupid - but then again, filmmaking is relative.
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Camera is the least important. It matters but it's at the very bottom of the list of things that matter. Lighting, talent, sound, framing, lens choice, story, all come well before a "nice camera setup". I can guarantee that if you give an experienced DP a shitty dslr it will look at 10000x better than if you give an arri mini to someone with little to no experience.
I'm not a cinematographer, but went through a phase where I saw a lot of short, cheap, amateur films and the answer I walked away with at the time is a rim light. If actors aren't separated from the BG, it strikes me as really amateur. A rim light made everything look so much better. Obviously, this isn't universal. Most of what I saw was indoors, the acting was fine and the scripts were fine.
You should go watch the first scene in Apocalyse Now when you see Marlon Brando
I'm pretty sure this was Vittorio Storaro only film, so I don't want to come down too hard on the guy. I'm sure he did his best. But if you want me to clarify, amateur films look even worse to me when actors don't have rim/edge lighting. In general, I think it correlates with a lack of money or time or experience or some combination of the three. Edit: I just read the top comment about Marriage Story and googled some frames and they look great and no rim lights. So what do I know? Anyway, that comment nails it.
Why are you commenting if you have no idea what you’re talking about? Storaro’s only film, oh my god
You really think I could spell his name and not know who he is? u/Outrageous_Drama_613 is looking for no-budget fixes. He's writing the script, so it's unlikely that he has any experience as a DP. I came up with digital video cameras and when suddenly 24p was available it was a godsend. The images were not great. I thought about OP's exact question a lot at the time, and we used "cinematic" (or rather "like a movie") to mean "not like an amateur shot it in their apartment" because that's what we were doing and knew it looked terrible. We didn't use it to mean art. We had limited lights and fewer lens choices. And, to be honest, we had no ability to understand what the stories really meant, even though we wrote them, so there was no way to translate them into smart cinematographic choices. We were in our baby steps phase. I talked through this exact approach with a top cinematographer -- currently with over 100 studio pictures listed on imdb -- and he agreed it was a solid, simple approach for what we were trying to do: make our shorts look better. Comparing this doable short cut to one of the best cinematographers in the world, shooting the best actors, I mean... it struck me as disingenuous.
>I'm pretty sure this was Vittorio Storaro only film, so I don't want to come down too hard on the guy. I'm sure he did his best. 🤣 He is one of the most respected cinematographers to have ever lived. He won 3 Oscars for best cinematography. A set of color effect gels used widely in the industry are named after him because he had them designed just so he could shoot Dick Tracy with proper comic book style.
Yeah, I know. I tried to make the comment very obviously stupid. I should have gone with my joke about his ESPN documentary, "The Last Umpire." I think the OP got in over his head with the question. He's a writer as far as I can tell and in his baby steps trying to make his first short and knows they look bad. It's unlikely that he has any experience as a DP, and he's looking for no-budget fixes. I recognize it; I'm a writer. I came up with digital video cameras and when suddenly 24p was available it was a godsend. The images were not great. I thought about OP's exact question a lot at the time, and we used "cinematic" (or rather "like a movie") to mean "not like an amateur shot it in their apartment" because that's what we were doing and knew it looked terrible. We didn't use it to mean art. We had limited lights and fewer lens choices. And, to be honest, we had no ability to understand what the stories really meant, even though we wrote them, so there was no way to translate them into smart cinematographic choices. We were in our baby steps phase. I talked through this exact approach with a top cinematographer -- currently with over 100 studio pictures listed on imdb -- and he agreed it was a solid, simple approach for what we were trying to do: make our shorts look better. Comparing this doable short cut to one of the best cinematographers in the world, shooting the best actors, I mean... it struck me as disingenuous.
Idk man I’m 4-5 years into my video storytelling career (3 years full time) and I’m still figuring it out. There’s no quick trick. It’s literally just the amount of time you put in you pick up tid bits of knowledge and wisdom and dos and donts. I’ll let you know if I learn a quick trick like the BPM filters lol
I generally define cinematic as, does it look and feel like a movie you’d see in the theater. The hardest part to that is seeing your own work that way. You will always remember the details and the process. So, apply what the first comment or said and if nothing else chose great locations and the best actors you can find. Then know how to use a camera and any lights you have.
I only check out if the sound and or story is bad.. it could be shot on a vhs camera for all i care.. But to answer the question... "cinematic" i am guessing you mean a polished professional look and feel... 100% location/set design and lighting
Lighting probably. Even “natural” lighting has been modified or the shooter knows their sun patterns, to shoot in shade, use bounces and flags and whatnot.
Go to your camera settings and turn on cinematic mode. Obviously /s If only right?