Sunday, October 12, 2008

Instructors That Provide Free-Rental Services Kick Ass!

So I decided to post my experience of watching "Visions Of Light" followed by "My Architect." I first of all suggest Visions Of Light to anyone interested in film. I think it is even more important for people like us who plan to implement film into the rest of our lives. The film starts with the seed of cinematography and is structured just like a historical timeline. It states the techonological and aesthetic advances of the past and present film industry, how the actual business side of film has developed over the decades, and ultimately it has footage from amazing productions to back up the claims that will have you wanting to re-watch all your favorite films, the films included as examples throught the film, and every film here-on-out in a different manner. Instead of watching my favorite movie afterwords.....I watched one of the top-rented at Spiro's Video Rentals: My
Architect.

I couldn't agree more with everything that Ben had to say about the film, but there were some things after directly seeing Visions of Light that boosted my experience from viewing it. I understood that Nathanial Kahn had to spend an unimaginable amount of time into this highly-personalized project, and it really came out in his cinematography. I realized that as an architect, lighting is just as important to you as a director or a DP. You are taking a deep consideration with the all-mighty light source, the sun, with your architectual projects that are exposed outside and working with natural and artificial lighting inside your man-made structures, which are all important to produce a high-quality product in the end. You can see that Nathanial Kahn has amazing shots, but I wondered who put in more work to make that happen? Was it Nathanial with his keen film expertise, or his father who had previously considered the beautiful atmospheres he would create which his son would film decades later.

I could go on for a very long time about my film-watching experience and would be happy to share more over some bbq or anything outside of a URL address, but I came away with two things that we should all try to become masters of:

1. Become skilled at recognizing "already-provided" lighting in your shooting locations that will not only make your job easier, but it will naturally bring beauty to your work.

2. Also become skilled at executing when there is unfortunately no "already-provided" lighting. I think you should take note of the natural lighting set-ups and how they work, so you can become a creator of those natural settings when you are deprived of them.

2 comments:

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Intro to Documentary-RTF said...

Thanks for the excellent Film Pairing review. This should be a trademarked review type actually. John, you should make a Top Ten Film Pairs list. I'd like to suggest Southern Comfort the documentary and Southern Comfort the fiction film about a group of Louisiana National Guards who get lost in the bayou!