PRO TIP: This Will Change Your Cinematography

Hello and guten tag here from Germany. I'm in Berlin this month and I'm directing and I have this one hair that keeps falling down and it's gone. But I wanted to talk today a bit about haze and why I think haze will change your footage and make it way more cinematic. We just released a video called Harm, it's a music video and we used a ton of haze in this so I thought I would do a bit of behind the scenes with that and talk to you guys about haze and how to use it. You know it actually surprises me how few YouTube videos there is out there about this technique and I almost exclusively use haze on any film set that I'm on. Anything I'm shooting or directing will have a hazer on standby and you know a lot of the Hollywood films out there and a lot of the professional sets that I've worked on use haze as well. And there's a lot of different types of haze, smoke and fog and we'll get into that in a So why haze? Well haze helps your scene for a few reasons. First when you're hazing or adding fog or smoke to a scene, you're adding particles to the air that weren't there before. So this is actually a really good thing because you're suddenly making an area that could be really empty, just open air. You're making it more interesting because you're giving that air texture. Haze allows you to give texture to the volume and the space that you're in. And secondly it gives more depth and that's usually what you're trying to do as a cinematographer is enhance depth, texture and shape of your scene making it more interesting. So haze allows you to add more depth. And then thirdly probably most importantly or one of my favorite things about haze is that it allows you to see light. Now what do I mean by that because we can see light all the time? Well it does this cool thing called beamage. And beamage is essentially where you can see a beam of light because when you add haze or fog to a scene, you're putting particles in the air. And so when your light leaves its source and lands somewhere, you're going to see where that light is traveling. And this is beautiful. You can put your subject or your character in there or you can even just shoot the beamage but it's going to look amazing. So we just released a music video a couple days ago and it's on my channel now. I'll put the link somewhere either below or around me right now. But why I'm talking about that is we used haze a lot because we were in kind of a normal studio space and we wanted to make it way more interesting. And that's the best thing about haze is it allows you to take what's normally a pretty boring or simple location and suddenly add all this texture to the air and beams of light and stuff that you can move through. Haze can take any location and make it suddenly way more cinematic and way more interesting to look at. So there are many different types of hazers foggers like I've been talking about. So let's talk about them right now. But first, a little disclaimer, using hazers and fog machines, they can trip fire alarms and also to they shouldn't be put in spaces where there's no ventilation. So always be using one of these with a professional or if you're not an adult with parent or guardian. First off, what's one of the first machines? Well, it's your classic hazer and hazer essentially gives a thin layer of mist or particles in the air that allow you then to see beamage the beams of light and just give you a bit more depth for space. And it's close cousin the fog machine. Sometimes people mix these two things up is different because a fog machine shoots out a much more thick plume of smoke and it's good for recreating, you know, the idea of like smoke in a room and it's much more thick and defined. You can see it more where a haze puts a mist through the entire room. And then thirdly, there is just like a fog machine, you can get low lying fog machines, which sometimes it's just a different bottle or different solution. And you put this in machine and it shoots out a fog that kind of hangs more near the ground. So it feels more like a low lying mist that you would see out in nature. And also there are dry ice machines and dry ice machines are kind of corny to me there. They remind me of weddings that I used to shoot, you'd put all the dry ice and put the bride and groom in the middle. But dry ice can be kind of cool because it looks like a creature, it moves around the ground. But the hassle with dry ice is that it's expensive. You got to get the bag of dry ice and if you get dry ice on your hand, it burns you and it dissipates really quickly. It goes away in like a second. Now that's not true in like 30 seconds, but I'm not a big fan of dry ice. It's cool for theater and stage, but for filmmaking, it looks too much like a corny wedding to me. And now if you're outdoors, you sometimes need your smoke to hang around longer and haze machines and fog machines won't really help that well because it'll just disappear into the air. So you can get something like an Artem smoker. Artem smokers should never be used indoors, it's like a chemical that isn't good for your respiratory system. But it shoots this smoke into the air that hangs around for a while and allows you to kind of haze out an actual outdoor space. And I love these. I use these on many music videos, creates a thick plume of smoke and then it hangs around for a lot longer and they're great for outdoor stuff. I used it a ton on the film we did called The Journey, we were able to add smoke outdoors and make it look like a wartime situation. And last but not least, there is nature's gift to us and that is just fog, real fog, real mist out in nature. And photographers loved this 50, 60 years ago, they still do today because it allows you to haze out an entire city or an entire mountainside, gives you texture and depth that you normally wouldn't have there. And it helps you isolate your subject that's so important so that your focus is on the And why I'm kind of so passionate about things like haze is it's actually going to make your footage more cinematic because it's changing what's happening in front of the lens. And it makes me kind of sad that there's so many YouTube videos out there that say, make your footage more cinematic. And then they just list a bunch of camera settings. And now it's important for you to know your camera, it's important for you to know the technology, but just changing your camera settings won't necessarily give you cinematic footage. It's what's happening in front of the camera that is the most important. So when should you use haze? Well, let's list a few. I think what haze does, and I've mentioned this a bunch of times, is it allows you to create a more interesting scenario out of kind of a boring location. Take for example, this parking lot, kind of normal, kind of plain, but we added a smoker behind our subject. And now I'm running through there and bring the camera around. It's a lot more interesting. Suddenly a parking lot that was just lit by some streetlights is something way more magical and way more different. I even did this for a sports commercial with Marcus Stroman. We had him on a baseball diamond and there wasn't anyone there, it was just him. And that could have been really boring. So we actually got a fog machine and just ran it at its top setting because the fog disappears so quickly outside, but we got him pitching inside that. And that made it look a lot more cool. And you can use this technique indoors as well for the music video again. We just wanted the subject when we were shooting them singing it to look a bit different. And so we put a lot of haze around them and put a light above them. Now this low angle shot, it looks different and it's a bit more cool than it would have been had we not had haze. Another time that you want to use haze is when you want to mitigate distractions, when you want people to be focused on your subject. And haze allows you to do this because it blurs out the background more and really makes your subject more pronounced. I've mentioned this one already, but haze gives you beamage. It allows you to see the light. It gives you texture of the light through the air. That's the time that you want to use it when you want to see the light around your person. Also too, there's times that you don't want to use haze. One is when you don't have ventilation or you have fire alarms around that you can't turn off or that you're not allowed to turn off, which I don't actually recommend turning off fire alarms, but I have known some people in the past who've turned them off when they've been on set so that they can use haze, but I don't condone this. That's terrible. Another time that you don't want to use haze is when it's going to interrupt the flow of filming. See, haze machines don't last all day. You have to keep reissuing the haze out of the machine every 10 to 15 minutes or even less depending the look you're going for. So with this, it can interrupt the flow of your shoot. If you're doing an interview, you don't want someone to be walking into the background hazing it every 10 minutes because one, it's going to interrupt your flow and two, it's going to distract your subject. I just did a series of documentaries for Twitter and man, I wanted a haze machine in the room. It would have made it look a lot more cool, but haze machines often sputter and shoot haze out even when you're not pressing the trigger because the pressure builds up. Suddenly the machine goes in the middle of it. It sounds like a snake having a seizure. So you don't necessarily want to use haze machines when you don't have the luxury of multiple takes. So I hope that helps. I'll be posting some links below to some hazers I recommend, some expensive ones, some cheaper ones, and I'll also make sure to post the link to the music video we just shot, which used a ton of haze and a ton of smoke. And there is like a motor parade of scooters here. There's like 25 of them. I don't know if you can see them. Are they gone? Oh no, they're still going. But anyways, I'll see you guys on the next one.