Components of Cinematic Video - Cinematography Techniques

Hi, I quite often talk about the cinematic light, showing my shots and art films. Also, you may have noticed many texts of cinematic in my videos. This is a quite popular thing that is searched by many cinematographers, lighting and cinematic. In this video, I want to share my formula of making cinematic video, because cinematic shots is not only about cinematic light. A good shot may consist of many difficult things. I will tell you my philosophy and methods of working with cinematic image. We will talk about work with composition, lighting, camera movement, music and sound design, set design and color grade. Also, I share my some sources that can be useful for developing your skills from the points above. Work with composition. I know when you want to film something and you had a PR template, I used this same strategy, but nobody can stop us from using these templates and break the scopes of banality. Just look at how this shot looks when using unusual composition working. Sometimes unusual and interesting composition can look quite cinematic. How to develop skills of working with composition? I advise copying ideas from the primary sources. Paintings of old and modern art, documentary and art photos, old films. What to look for when analyzing other people's works of art? Pay attention to how the author works with the size of the frame. How he shows us the long, medium, close-up shots. If you don't know fundamental framing yet, then I advise learning classification of the shot composition from any open sources. Learn framing techniques such as pivvy, clean and dirty shots. How does the shoulder insert, single shot, two, three and more number shots. And don't forget to look at what camera angle types are. Many times I try to get rid of a habit to shoot simple and dull frames using such a very simple formula of working with frame size and composition. And when I think outside the box, I have a more interesting and cinematic frame. Lighting Of course, lighting is a very important part of working of DP. And this is the main tool of creating cinematic image of the frame. The main technique that I use when creating cinematic light is volume grading. In simple words, I split a background and a foreground by means of lighting technique. Get rid of a flat look while lighting. The volumetric light helps to emphasize significant subjects in the frame. People, props, etc. The volumetric light looks very cinematic. This is a not simple topic and you can learn it more on my channel or my online course. Where I will teach a professional setting of lighting and work with a set design. What else I can recommend you how to improve your lighting skills? Look more cinematography breakdowns, books, online courses. And you should practice. Without practice, any new information is useless. Because you will forget it quite fast. Camera movement Static shot can look very beautiful and motivated by the mood and plot. And the handheld or slide camera movements as well. The key word of movement of a camera is motivation. Motivation will help you to choose the type of movement. And the movement can help you to give more information to viewer about the rhythm in the scene, characters, relationships. And mood inside the frame or story. And camera movement can give you a shot cinematic effect by means of filling volume with movement through the space in the scene. It can help the frame to be not dull. For example, I could have shot this with static camera without any movements. But it will be so boring. I did a little move from the long shot to the middle shot by means of delay. A little cinematic magic with camera movement. On this shot, I just move toward the character. Just I want to say, hey, she and the cat are the main characters in the frame. I want to accent on them. And then I want to accent on the cat. See? The camera movement helps to show better things of the story with more cinematic language. How to develop skills of working with camera movement. And how to understand motivation of this. This is not an advert. This is my friendly advice. I learned to work with camera movement in the course Hollywood Camera Work. I have never seen anything better. Also, in order to diversify and improve your techniques of working with movement, I advise you to copy ideas from the movies. Again, copy what you like and what inspires you. But keep in mind that you will need good tools for good smooth camera movement. Sliders, dolly, a good tripod with smooth and heavy head, and a person who will help you with focus. Music. This is my favorite part. The music is a very important part of your video. Choosing the music is a very delicate task, as you need to get exactly in the mood of the video. Don't overdo with epic, tempo or vocal. Be extremely selective and careful. I advise you not to rush to add music, but to devote as much time to this activity as you need, finding the perfect track. For choosing suitable music, I use Epidemic Sound platform. Why this? Because the platform has quite rich and cool choice. Epidemic Sound catalogs has over 30,000 professionally produced tracks and over 90,000 sound effects. Fresh and new tracks are added every week. And today I have an exclusive discount for you guys. Sign up and get 90 days free with discount. Any video that you use during your trials will remain safe and protected, even if you cancel your subscription after your trial months is over. I love music so much. And sometimes the music can be a basis for my new video or story. I spend a lot of time searching something cool. I sort the music I like into categories and genres. For example, I don't know yet what I will shoot in the future, but most likely it will be something classic with slow narrative. I'm looking for a new music using the tag with which one? Of course, cinematic. There is a lot of music that I'm looking for. I use a more accurate description of what I want using the mood song. Set design To simply explain how set design works, take a look at these shots before and after. Wardrobe, props, work with colors. All these influence to how your shot will look. Simple advice. Take control of what clothes your character will wear in the scene. What color it will be. Avoid bright and motley colors. If they don't match your shooting style and your story, try to minimize the number of colors in the frame. And you will feel a big difference between a shot with uncontrolled colors and in the frame. Pay attention to what clothes your favorite characters wear in the movie, music videos, etc. Some clothes look terrible in the frame, as a black or white T-shirt, for example, because the monochrome white looks flat and bounds all light in the scene. And monochrome black absorbs the light and looks not volumetric in the frame. I rented or bought all costumes for my characters. I could not afford actors to come to the set with clothes that I didn't see. And I have the second advice for you. Search an interesting location for filming. The main part of working with set design is to show cool and cinematic location in the scene. You can dress your character with the best cinematic clothes. You can make cinematic light setup and even make cinematic camera movement. But if you make all this in a dull, small and terrible location, the shot can look not as good as can be with a good location. What do I mean saying the good location? The first, this is a big space for working when you don't have difficulties with size of shooting. You can make a long shot here and even add more details and props in the foregrounds. A small place doesn't allow you to do it. The second point, this place should have special cinematic atmosphere. It can be old church, beautiful nature with magic sunrise, or it can be a scary house with wrecked walls, etc. Just pay attention to the location where you film. Color grade. Color grading process can fundamentally change your shot. You can improve the image with post-production, lighting, color change and contrast. You can change the mood or make the scene more cinematic with lots of plugins. This is a quite complicated topic and therefore, I will tell you about my color grading tools and techniques in details in the next video.