Camera Positions!

Cinematography, What is it? Cinematography directly translates to “writing in movement.” This simply means it is the arts and crafts of capturing moving images using a film or camera. Angle, level, height, and distance all make up cinematography. Also, those terms can overlap with each other.

1) Stills from existing media that demonstrate the following:

a) 

Still from East of Eden (1955) using angle to convey conflict and development.

Here, a Dutch angle is used to convey conflict by creating a sense of uneasiness and disorientation.

b)

Still from Tess (1979) using level to convey character.
This is a ground-level shot which shows the girl to be close to the earth/nature (literally grounded) which reflects her innocence and connection to the rural environment.

c) 

Still from Submarine (2010) using height to convey conflict
Here, the audience is in the point of view of the main character. The two people are shown to be at a higher height, looking down on the main character. This creates an imbalance of power and a scene of tension and uneasiness.

d) 

Still from Submarine (2010) using distance to convey conflict

  In this long shot, the girl is shown to be far from the camera and alone. The setting makes it so that it further emphasizes her isolation and conflicted emotions, and can even make it feel overwhelming.

Stills created by me (my recreations!) that demonstrate the following: 

a)

A still using angle to convey conflict, character and development
Here is another Dutch angle used to show tension and uneasiness, maybe even unbalancedness between the two guys.

b)

A still using level to convey conflict, character and development
I used a eye-leveled shot to show character and how the two boys are likely on good terms.

c)

A still using height to convey conflict, character and development
Here, I tried using height to make both appear smaller and vulnerable since we are looking down on them.

d)

A still using distance to convey conflict, character and development
The distance makes the two guys look smaller compare to the environment, emphasizing how big the problem feels and how far apart they are emotionally, even though they’re physically close.

Written Reflection 

There were many challenges I faced, but it was mostly misunderstanding the concepts (once again). Just like for my last blog, I ask around, researched more and it helped. Overall, I got the gist of the cinematography/camera positions but when it came to knowing how to convey it into my stills, it became an issue. Mostly because I knew how to identify it didn’t know how to apply it.

My biggest challenge was telling the difference between angle, height and level. Height, I still don’t fully understand the concept but for this blog, I focused on making the camera the point of view of another person/thing in order to show the height difference between them and the focal object from a higher or lower perspective and what it can convey and represent. Also, when it came to height specifically, I kept confusing height in terms of camera positions and height in terms of mise en scène. For example, I kept thinking about the height difference between two items, or people. However, when taking the actual shots, I tried not to angle it but I still felt like I did anyway. 

Speaking of which, for angle, I wanted to do a high or low angled shot but it was too similar to my heights still. So, I settled with finding and taking a dutch angled shot to convey what I wanted. As for level, I believe it is when the camera is balanced to something (ex. eye, ground).  To avoid less confusion than necessary I stuck with taking either an eye-leveled shot or a ground-leveled shot. In summary, this blog helped me learn a lot about cinematography but it also taught me to fully understand everything I learnt before applying it to my work.

-🍎🧃