A while back I started a book recommendation series where I’d recommend what I thought were the best books in each area of filmmaking. Today we’re continuing with cinematography books. Unlike the first category of screenwriting, I’ve read a lot of cinematography books so I feel more confident in which ones are good and useful, and which ones suck.
All of these are in the good category, and they’re listed in order of usefulness.
If you only read one book, read this one. Cinematography covers all the basics in an easy to understand yet thorough way. You’ve got shot design, lighting, color temperature, film stock and everything else that falls into the science and art of cinematography. This was the book that finally made everything click for me.
This is another must-read classic. Five C’s focuses on how to tell a story through Camera Angles, Continuity, Cutting, Close-Ups, and Composition (more like Four C’s and an A). It has hundreds of pictures (from the classic 50s) to get all the points across.
If you want to have anything to do with the camera team then this is a must read. Directors and Producers should read this too just to understand everything that goes into the proper running and maintenance of an efficient camera and the accompanying team. It covers everything from checking gates to changing film to tips on how to always be alert to actors, directors, cinematographers and always on top of your game.
This is one of those books where half of it is very useful chapters on lighting and color temperature and cine-stuff, and the other half is a reference for just about any light or light shaping device ever created. It’s a must have for planning how to light a set and a great reference book to have around.
This is a great workshop type book that walks you through how you would cover a scene with different shots and all the tools available to a director (and cinematographer) to use the camera as a story telling tool. There’s also a follow up book, Film Directing: Cinematic Motion, that has fewer examples but goes much more in-depth.
Each chapter is by a different, famous cinematographer who walks you through the lighting of a scene, with an emphasis on a different cinematographic technique in each scene. It’s a great read that focuses on real-world applications of all this lighting theory.
The ASC Manual always sounded really cool and a must have book, but I’ve never found it to have anything that you couldn’t just look up online and print with a little forethought. It’s got tons of charts and reference diagrams, but for the price it never attracted me, especially since it has ads in it as well. I felt obligated to list it, but for me it falls in the borderline sucky category.
Just about all the links take you to the book’s Amazon listing, but check out the ASC site for some bundled deals.
This past week I’ve been in New York, catching up with a bunch of long, lost Film School peeps and making the rounds to the museums, hitting up the Model as Muse exhibit at the Met, Richard Avedon’s Fashion Photography at ICP, and the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition for the 50th Anniversary at the Guggenheim (they’re all great).
And while I’ve been having tons of fun, the reason that prompted this trip is I have some photos from Haiti displayed at Figment, an art festival. It’s a free festival on Governor’s Island (that takes a free ferry to get to). It runs this weekend, so if you’re in New York and want something to do, you should check it out. There’s a bunch of other cool, interactive art projects including a mini golf course (and the free ferry gives you a great view of downtown Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty).
By far the place that interested me the most when I went to Haiti was Desdra. Desdra is a remote village right on the shore, surrounded by mountains and lush trees.
The village was described as something you’d find in National Geographic, and it wasn’t too far off. It takes a rough jeep ride to get out there, on a road that’s flooded for part of the year, cutting the village off from receiving supplies.
While the locale is beautiful, trash litters the beach. The people are willing to work, the only problem is there is no work.
One man hand builds fishing boats, designed for short range sailing. However many of them will be used in attempts to make it to South Florida.
There are also canoes hand carved out of logs. When we visited, the children took them out into the water, sailing around, splashing each other, and having a good time.
That was one thing I noticed around Haiti – no matter how bad the situation, the children were always smiling and having fun.
Well originally I thought the article was for one of their little online only blogs, some sort of ‘hot thing of the day’ to fill up web space.
No. It was actually in print, in the hard copy of the weekly Observer distributed internationally.
While that’s very exciting and surprising, it kind of makes me sad. I’m a big fan of newspapers, and of course their future is a big mystery, one that isn’t looking too bright. Will they survive or will the speed and free access of blogs be their end? Blogs are criticized for being too subjective and lack the time and budget to do hard, investigative journalism.
Well, this time, the newspaper is the one that got it wrong. All the blogs that wrote about Typewriter and the history behind it got the quote attribution correct while the international newspaper, the one that’s supposed to have all the facts straight and checked, was wrong.
I know the piece was tiny and shoved on the back page, but in a time when newspapers future’s are on the line, they can’t afford to get it wrong. They need to be more detailed, more thourough, and more in-depth than ever before to differentiate themselves from the instant but shallow news source of blogs.
I’m in Sarasota right now, on what I believe is my first paying video job. It’s operating a HI-POD, basically a 30 foot pole with a camera on top, for filming a soccer tournament. I’ve seen more soccer matches in that past two days than I’ve seen in my life, and there’s still two more to go.
The weather hasn’t been too friendly. Friday we were shut down due to lightning (because, you know, with a 30 foot pole you kind of turn into a lightning rod), so we packed everything up, hung out under cover as the storm skated by without a drop falling on a field, and then went back out and resumed. About a half hour later I hear rain falling. I turn and see a wall of rain heading towards me, like something from a cartoon. It came, drenched us, then passed. Only in Florida.
In between the rain trying to make up its mind, I thought I was safe from the sun with the cloudy, moody weather.
Wrong. I got destroyed. I am so, so burnt. My shirt on Saturday was a little shorter than the one from Friday, so you could clearly see the line where I go from mild white to golden crispy. I lost count of all lame jokes I got, mainly from referees. However, the joke was on them when they came out to the field and one says, “Oh shoot, we forgot the balls.”
Plus the crazy, screaming coaches and fathers are bringing back suppressed memories from my embarrassing sports attempts in childhood. While the most they’ve done is yell at each other, filming a fight like this from an aerial view would mix things up a bit.
So while I’m here, baking and trying to get vegetarian lunches, a project from my documentary has gone viral. It’s a Typewriter program. Basically I came across an interesting quote from Will Self on how he liked the restrictions of a typewriter and the fear of knowing there was no going back – if you wanted to make a change you’d have to rewrite the whole thing.
So I had someone make a simple text editor that couldn’t delete or copy and paste.
Well, it only takes one mention from a big site to get things going, and that came from Lifehacker. It’s very exciting when something catches on and the idea of the program seems to have resonated with a lot of people, which is very cool.
And tonight I just saw I got a mention in The Guardian, however they wrongly attributed Will Self’s quote to me. While I do remember playing with my mom’s typewriter at work, I never used it for any real writing. Plus her’s actually had a backspace.
Next thing I’m hoping to go viral is an interview I did with Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. Here it is, please pass it on:
I’m in Sarasota right now, on what I believe is my first paying video job. It’s operating a 
