Directing the Camera

by Gil Bettman

  The DP has to work with the director on the camera blocking because camera blocking is dependent on actor blocking. But he doesn’t need you to pick the lens and set the f-stop. He would just as soon do this on his own. That way the look of the film is solely an expression of his artistry. When you start to meddle in lens selection, you are working on the DP’s canvas, but you must do this because the look of the film can help or hinder the telling of the story, and the story is your responsibility. In this crux lies the irony of the director/cinematographer relationship. It’s his canvas. He does the painting, but you tell him what to paint, and, in the end, you are held responsible for how the painting comes out.

  Another factor in the equation that determines the chemistry of the director/cinematographer relationship is industry clout. If you are a first-time director and you have been intentionally teamed with a renowned cinematographer with a track record as long as the Nile, then you may consult with him on lens selection, but in the end, it would be politically savvy for you to defer.

  Similarly, the pecking order on the set of every episodic TV series that I have worked on as a director places the DP above the director. Only the showrunner, the executive producer, the star, and (sometimes) the line producer can make him back down. The DP is usually handpicked by the star. The “look” of the show is his personal creation. All of the crew are his boys. He has been supporting them financially, carrying them from job to job, sometimes for twenty or thirty years. The DP is there every day, episode after episode, season after season, whereas the directors come and go, rotating on and off the show. Sometimes as many as six or seven different directors will be hired in the course of a twenty-plus-episode season. Compared to the DP, the director is just an interloper — a queen for a day.

  This was never more clearly illustrated to me than when I heard Benny Colman, a DP whom I worked with on The Fall Guy, describe the time he had been obliged, in the course of a debate over lenses, to take the great Spielberg down a notch or two. Benny was an old, old-timer. He had started his career when movies were still silent, working on Tom Mix Westerns. In those days, the lenses used in American films were mostly made by Kodak and were measured in inches. Even though widespread use of American-made lenses died out after World War II, Benny still called all the lenses we used on The Fall Guy by their equivalent length in inches — just to remind everyone on the set that he had more than half a century of experience under his belt.

  Benny was more than eighty years old, but he still fancied himself a dandy. He wore patent leather shoes that matched his pastel, double-knit leisure suits, and doused his thinning hair with so much Grecian Formula, it turned purple when backlit by a strong arc light. Any attractive actress who did not joyously submit to being kissed and hugged and politely felt up a half a dozen times a day by Benny, and did not respond to his avuncular sexual banter by matching it thrust for thrust, ran the risk of finding herself looking shockingly plain in her close-ups. He was very much old Hollywood.

  Benny had been the DP on Marcus Welby, M.D. According to him, during his tenure, Spielberg, who started his directing career doing episodic TV at Universal, was hired to do a special one-hour episode of Welby. Prior to the shooting, Spielberg submitted a list of all the specialized camera equipment that he felt he would need to shoot the episode he envisioned.

  “I took one look at that list and started crossing shit off!” Benny boasted gleefully one day when I was directing an episode of The Fall Guy. “I mean, that smart-ass kid had every trick lens in the F&B Ceco catalogue on that list . . . a 10, a retro focus 10, a 300, a 600, and on top of that, a hot-head, a steadicam, a Titan crane! You name it, he had it! And I crossed ’em all off. I mean, hell! If you can’t shoot it with a one-inch, a two-inch, or a three-inch, it ain’t a Welby!”

  In the Tom Mix days, a one-inch was used for all establishing shots. The two-inch was used for all two-shots and the three-inch for all close-ups. By forcing the great Spielberg to shoot his Welby episode with these or similarly elemental lenses, Benny had deprived Spielberg of the instruments that he used to give his movies a different, more dynamic look, and ultimately, to transform the visual aspect of all mainstream films. But when it came to Marcus Welby, it was Benny, who had learned his tricks shooting Tom Mix movies, who knew better.

  There is an interesting footnote to this story. According to another old hand in the editorial department at Universal, Spielberg’s Welby still had a more dynamic visual aspect than all other Welbys. In the end, the young film god in the making, although he was just a notch over twenty, had bent the crusty old lord of the manor to his will. My guess is that because Spielberg knew so much about lenses, and had stood up to the old curmudgeon, he probably had won his grudging respect and cooperation, so in the end, Benny willingly shot it Spielberg’s way.

  The lesson in this little bit of Hollywood lore is that when you get your breakthrough gig directing, whether it is an episodic TV show like Marcus Welby, M.D., a low-budget indie feature, or a studio movie, if you are going to make sure that the finished product represents your best work, then, like Spielberg, you have to have a good command of lens selection. The DP, whether gently or aggressively, is going to challenge you in your attempt to wrest some of his absolute control over the look of the picture. The more you know about lenses, the more likely you are to succeed.

  Remember, filmmaking is a collaborative medium. Put your DP’s knowledge and experience to work for you. Listen to his suggestions, and don’t nitpick. If he’s acting ornery, don’t ride him too hard. I generally leave the lens selection up to the DP on all shots except those that call out for a forced perspective or some other very specific look. I want the DP to take ownership of the film. He will do a better job if he feels like it’s his canvas. So let him do the painting. But know your lenses so you can talk to him and guide him while he paints. This way the picture will come out looking the way you envisioned it. If your DP is gifted, it may come out looking better than you envisioned. In either case, it represents your best work.

  THE BASICS OF PERSPECTIVE

  Lens selection is easy because, to the extent to which you need to master it in order to succeed as a director, you only have to fully understand two visual concepts: how “normal perspective” is altered by 1) a telephoto or “long” lens and 2) a wide-angle lens. Normal perspective doesn’t take much work to understand. Normal perspective is how objects in the foreground look in relation to objects in the background through the naked eye. If you were looking at three cows in a pasture, even though they are all the same size, the one closest to you, in the foreground, is going to look the largest. The one farthest away from you, in the background, is going to look the smallest (Figure 5.001). The one in the middle, or in the middleground, is going to look smaller than the one in the foreground and larger than the one in the background. This is how normal perspective alters the way things look the farther away from you they are. Size and distance are diminished as they recede into the background. If you’re shooting on 16mm film, the 25mm lens would give you this perspective. In 35mm film, the 50mm lens produces a normal perspective.

  5.001

  Lenses for 16 cameras give you the same look as lenses for 35 cameras that are twice their length. For the sake of simplicity, and because historically feature films have been shot on 35mm film, from this point forward I am only going to refer to 35 lens lengths. If you want to translate this into lenses for 16 cameras, simply divide by two. When it comes to digital cameras, the numbers vary for reasons too complex to go into. Suffice it to say that lens length when shooting 35mm has become the common denominator — the lingua franca. If you want to communicate exactly what sort of look you want from a lens, refer to the lens length when shooting 35mm. Any DP who is worthy of being your partner in creating the visual design of your film should know exactly what you want. This is true now and will remain true for some time, even though everything is rapidly changing over from film to digital.

  Unless some unusual
aspect of the story demands it, the longest lens you would ever have occasion to use on the set of your breakthrough directing gig is a 300mm, and the widest lens is a 10mm. A 300mm gives you an ultra-telephoto look. This is the look of that common shot of the horse and rider galloping right at the lens across the desert, in which you see the heat wavering up off the desert floor, and the horse and rider ride and ride but never seem to get any closer; they always remain off in the distance, hanging, suspended in the middle of the frame. The 10 gives you a “fisheye” look: what you see through the peephole of a door. Okay, that’s it. Now you know everything you need to know about lenses. Almost.

  The 300 and the 10 are the two extremes. Every other lens does what they do, except less so. If you fully understand what the extremes do, you can easily extrapolate what all the other lenses do. For example, anything shot with a 150mm lens will give you a telephoto look that is half as extreme as a 300. A 100mm produces a medium telephoto or medium long shot. A 75mm is slightly long. A 50mm, as we said, is normal. On the wide-angle end of the spectrum, a 20mm lens gives you a standard wide shot, a 30mm a medium wide shot, and a 40mm a shot more normal than wide. Now you know everything about lenses that you need to know. Well, not quite.

  The best way to learn your lenses is to get hold of a digital camera and do all the camerawork on a bunch of films for yourself or your friends. If you hate cameras and don’t want to make a fool of yourself trying to play cinematographer, then, at least, get hold of a digital single lens reflex camera with a 12mm to 125mm zoom lens and shoot a couple of hundred images with it using as many different lens settings as possible. Even the worst technophobe shouldn’t be afraid to do this, because with the automatic exposure and focus functions on all digital cameras what you see is what you get. Then download your images onto your computer. Cull out the misfires and ponder the keepers.

  If you do any of the above and study the results, you will give yourself a lesson in lens selection that is more complete, easier to grasp, and will stay in your brain longer than anything I could write in this book. Why? For the same reason that cavemen started drawing on walls: because a picture is worth a thousand words. By studying the look of what you shot with the long lens and seeing how it differs from normal perspective, and then looking at what you shot with the wide-angle and figuring out just how it differs from normal perspective, you will give yourself a powerful empirical lesson in how lenses change the perspective and alter the look of a shot.

  EXTREME TELEPHOTO AND EXTREME WIDE-ANGLE VERSUS NORMAL PERSPECTIVE

  Figure 5.004 shows you the normal perspective of a 50mm lens. The girl in the foreground, who is three feet tall (from the waist up), appears shorter than the truck in the middleground, which is 12 feet tall. The truck appears shorter than the smokestacks in the background, which are 100 feet tall. They diminish in size as they recede in the distance at the same rate that they would if viewed through the eye.

  Figure 5.005 shows you the perspective of an extreme wide-angle lens. The girl looks taller than the truck and the truck looks taller than the smokestacks. This is because, when seen through an extreme wide-angle lens, foreground objects look bigger than they do to the naked eye, whereas middleground and background objects look smaller.

  The wide-angle lens also forces the perspective so that all distances between the objects in the frame are expanded. The smokestacks in the background look smaller and farther away from the viewer than they would to the naked eye, and the girl looks larger and closer.

  The three cows in the pasture when seen through an extreme wide-angle lens would look like Figure 5.002.

  Figure 5.006 shows you the perspective of the extreme telephoto lens. The truck has grown in relation to the girl, as have the smokestacks. They all look to be about the same height. Extreme telephoto lenses use the telescopic properties of the lens to make both middleground and background objects look larger than they do to the naked eye. Because they are bigger they look closer. This is how extreme long lens shots radically compress the distance between objects in the frame. The middleground and the background both seem to be squashed together and forced into the foreground.

  The three cows in the pasture when seen through an extreme telephoto lens would look like Figure 5.003.

  To get the wide-angle forced perspective look of Figure 5.005 or the telephoto forced perspective look of Figure 5.006, the camera has to be moved in relation to the objects in the frame. To the naked eye, or when seen through a lens with a normal perspective, the girl seems smaller than the truck. To distort the size of the foreground object — the girl — to make it seem larger than the truck or the smokestacks, the camera must be moved closer to it.

  Similarly, when using an extreme telephoto lens, the camera must be moved farther away from the foreground object in order to get the forced perspective look achieved by enlarging the middleground and background objects, and squeezing them into the foreground.

  It is important to remember that the camera has to be placed extremely close to the foreground object in order to get a forced perspective wide-angle shot, and a good distance away from the foreground, middleground, and background objects in order to achieve a forced perspective telephoto look. Don’t go ahead and draw a storyboard of the shot, or put it down on your shot list, without asking yourself if you can actually position the camera extremely close to or extremely far away from the subject of the shot.

  LENSES — FIELD OF VISION AND DEPTH OF FIELD

  In addition to forcing perspective, wide-angle and telephoto lenses alter the look of a shot in two other noticeable and important ways: by affecting the field of vision and the depth of field. That means the lens you use can make what you see through the camera either very restricted and narrow as if you were looking through a tunnel, or very wide and all-encompassing, which is the way we see the world through our own eyes. The lens can also keep everything in the frame in sharp focus, or restrict the focus to one narrow plane in the foreground, middleground, or background. Before an aspiring director can become adept at lens selection, he must also understand these two other ways lenses change the look of a shot.

  5.002

  5.003

  An extreme telephoto lens compresses what the camera sees from one side of the frame to the other. It seems to narrow the frame. In Figure 5.006, looking through a 300mm lens you can only see about a twenty-meter wide section at the back of the parking lot in which these photos were taken.

  By contrast, the wide-angle lens widens what the camera sees from one side of the frame to the other. In Figure 5.004, looking through a 50mm lens with normal perspective, you would be able to see about a fifty-meter section of the parking lot running from one edge of the frame to the other. In Figure 5.005, looking through a 10mm, extreme wide-angle lens, you can see a section almost 200 meters wide through the middle of the parking lot.

  Our eyes have almost 180 degrees of field of vision, so if you hold your hands up on either side of your face you can see both hands. In order to survive as animals in the jungle, human beings as a species developed good peripheral vision. In this way, the field of vision of our eyes is more like an extreme wide-angle lens, such as a 10mm, than a “normal” or a 50mm lens. The normal lens — the 50mm — looks just like what we see through our eyes when it comes to perspective. But when it comes to field of vision, the extreme wide-angle, such as a 10mm, looks more like what we see through our eyes. This is the one inconsistency in all the rules.

  With an extreme wide-angle lens, the focus is deep. Usually it encompasses everything in the frame. In Figure 5.005, when seen through a 10mm lens, the image of the girl and the truck are hard-edged and sharp. The smokestacks are a little blurry, but this is because this photo was made immediately next to the ocean and there was a lot of moisture in the air. If shot in the desert with this lens, all three objects would be in sharp focus. With a normal lens, a 50mm, as in Figure 5.004, the immediate foreground is slightly out of focus, whereas the middleground and the background are i
n focus. With an extreme telephoto lens, the focal plane is squashed and narrow. Figure 5.006 does not give you a good idea of the limitations of the focal plane in most long lens shots, because Figure 5.006 was shot in bright daylight with a special split diopter filter, so that the girl, the truck, and the smokestacks would all be in focus. Without the diopter filter and in lower light levels, only one of the three objects could be held in focus (Figure 5.007). Figure 5.007 was shot with a 300mm lens, without the diopter filter, so only the girl is in sharp focus, while the truck and the smokestacks are a little soft. This is usually the case when using an extremely long lens. You usually have to pick if you want the foreground, middleground, or the background sharp and hard-edged, because ordinarily you can only get one of the three in sharp focus.

  GENERAL APPLICATIONS OF DIFFERENT LENSES

  General Applications of Field of Vision and Depth of Field

  When trying to learn how lenses change the way things look through a camera it is often easiest to separate two of the ways lenses do this — field of vision and depth of field — from the third — perspective. This is because the first two work in ways that amplify each other whereas perspective has a more unique effect on the look of a shot.

  5.004

  5.005

  5.006

  5.007

  • WIDE-ANGLE LENSES — USE OF PROPERTIES DERIVED FROM FIELD OF VISION AND DEPTH OF FIELD

  The different lenses lend themselves to different dramatic applications. Wide-angle lenses “see more.” Their depth of field and their field of vision are greater, which means when you use a wide-angle almost everything in the frame is in focus, and the frame is expanded on the right and left, top and bottom. These properties make the wide-angle the logical choice for an establishing shot — the shot that shows the audience everything it needs to know about the place where the scene that follows is going to unfold. When you want to see it all and it’s big — whether it is an outdoor location, the exterior of a building, or the interior of a room — and it has a couple or a couple of thousand people in it, then a wide lens, which is to say a 10mm up to a 20mm, is the lens of choice.