Chapter 5

    This week in our Film 100 class we watched the movie Get Out, which I will be discussing during my next blog post, and we were assigned to read Chapter 5 in our book, Moving Pictures: An Introduction to Cinema. The topic of Chapter 5 is Cinematography, which is one of the most important parts of how cinema works. I've heard the word used before, but I never truly understood what it meant until I read the chapter. All I knew before was that cinema is an abbreviation for cinematography. 

    There is a lot of information discussed in Chapter 5 that I can go over in this blog post because there is more to cinematography than what meets the eye. The cinematographer, also knows as the director of photography since they oversee how a mise-en-scéne is captured in a film through each frame, has a whole team working for them. As a whole, the entire team, mostly the cinematographer, has to take the following into consideration: the recording medium, colors, lighting, lens type, composition, camera movement, the length of takes, and more. I could go on to discuss all of this information, but the blog post would be too long at that point. So, to keep it shorter and be able to dive deep into one particular subject I am choosing to discuss the recording medium during this blog post.

    There are two different recording mediums a cinematographer can choose from, digital and film. Honestly, I did not know a cinematographer could still choose to make a film using a physical film stock. Nor was I aware that using physical film stock has advantages compared to digital. Despite being more expensive due to strips being charged per foot, the look of a film that was produced using film stock is more organic and natural compared to digital. On the other hand, digital allows for more filming that is at a higher frame rate. Older movies used to have a motion blur inbewteen frames to help the movie flow more smoothly, but at a higher frame rate this is no longer needed which improves the resolution of the movie itself. Now, film viewer can find themselves in new and highly detailed locations, providing them with an amazing cinematic experience.

    This is just a short summary in my opinion of what I understood from the book. Personally, I cannot say exactly which I prefer as I have only worked with digital filming before. As cameras have increased in resolution over the years, even cameras on phones can take highly detailed photos and videos. In my animation class, a project we had to do with a group was creating a stop motion animation. Based on what we had decided for our project, one group member was in charge of the background, one was in charge of shooting each image and editing, and I was in charge of building a character from clay and moving them and the props around. Making my other animations digitally was a lot easier due to the tools located in the software that allowed be to edit character movement, actions, and control other factors in the app. For this stop motion animation project, each frame had to be set up individually with previous actions in mind in order to make it difficult to create. In the end, I'd say it was worth it though.