Reading & writing

The Bare Bones Camera Course For Film and Video by Tom Schroeppel

Ch. 7 – Lighting

• Exteriror lighting – the sun moves too much and creates a lot of shadows. Usually, the subject faces the sun to minimize this. But, you should still use a reflector to balance the light to shadow ratio.
• Fill-light – a daylight colored light source, usually with the color temp of about 5400kelvin. A disadvantage of using a light outdoors is that you need electricity, the light may not be strong enough compared to the light coming from the sun, you need the light closer to the subject and it could be in the shot. An advantage of it would be that it’s not dependent on the sun and you can place it anywhere you need it – best for backlit scenes where a reflector would put a shine onto the subject when it shouldn’t have one.
• Interior lighting
  • Focusing quartz – movie/tv version of a spotlight and ranges from spot to flood. A disadvantage of using this would be that the lighting may come across the camera as inconsistent and wouldn’t be a smooth pattern, as the light is hard, direct light that produces sharp-edged shadows. You can diffuse the light by bouncing it off of a light colored surface.
  • Broads – non-focusing lights designed to put an even light source over an area.
  • Softlight – permanent, portable bounce light. Basically, the lights they use on picture-day at school.

Ch. 9 – Doing it

• Planning and shooting a sequence
  • What do you want to end up with? What story do you want to tell? Who is the audience?
  • Shooting plan: decide camera shots & subjects. For shorter sequences, shoot the whole thing in a wide-angle, then goback and shoot close-ups & medium shots. Then shoot cutaways. This will help you to achieve the best results to ease editing.

Some Final Words – page 141

• Practice this form of art until you get the basics down, and then you can stray from the basics.
• Welcome criticism. It’s the only way to progress.
• Professionalism is based on te ability to repeat your successes, and avoid repeating failures.
• Practice this form of art until you get the basics down, and then you can stray from the basics.
• Welcome criticism. It’s the only way to progress.
• Professionalism is based on te ability to repeat your successes, and avoid repeating failures.
• Slate – identification of a shot/scene to find your place in editing.
• Shooting scripts – a list of what you’re going to do and how you’re going to shoot it.
• Storyboard – the same thing as the script, but visual.