How did they film this? - Cinematography Breakdown

All right good people of the internet, let's do another one of those break down other people's cinematography and try and work out how they did it with our knowledge and wisdom. But mainly the behind the scenes footage. Okay so I came across this good footage from this smash hit from Channing Tatum called Dog. It looks like there's some interesting cinematography in this behind the scenes footage. So let's see if we can get up the actual movie. It's only available on Google, Amazon and YouTube for $25. Fuckin' hell, am I really paying $25 for this? All right Channing, strap on your skates, we're going in. So the movie actually looks beautiful from the five minutes I've scrubbed through it. They're shooting on the Sony Venice with the Panavision T-Series. This is pretty cool, this little remote control car with the Ronin 2 on it and they've got a Komodo, a yellow Komodo. Pretty cool. But they haven't got the anamorphic lenses on this. They're shooting spherical for this because I imagine it would be too heavy and you can see it's the red Komodo from this feed here. I guarantee there was three seconds of that shot that was good. Is that a stunt double? All right, what else we got? If you ever shoot dogs and people outside, the contrast levels from the fur on the dog's face to a human's face is so different. And you can see it in the shot here. They've got this white board here for Channing and then the silver board here bashing the sun in for the dog. It's just all the fur on the dog's face just sucks up all the light. So you need to add so much more. I've seen some people sometimes at daytime you're having direct hard light on them just to raise that level because it's so hard to get an exposure on their face sometimes. Yeah, then they're doing pretty much the same thing here as well. They've got natural light on old mate here. And then there's this crew member here, silver gold bounce into the dog so we can see it. All that light there is from that hard bounce board. And then we go up to him and it's just flary and kind of natural. All right, let's go on to the next one. Was that worth it for $25? I don't know. All right, this is a pretty cool simple daytime exterior from the movie Vice shot by Greg Frazier. So the camera's on the dark side of the line here. And we've got a huge amount of floppies. We've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 floppies, I think. And that's creating all this contrast on his face here. And then we've got the sun's on the other side of the house. And it's sort of bouncing into these trees. And that's why his face is a bit green bouncing from the trees. Then they've got this what looks like an ultra bounce on the ground. And that's sort of just filling in on his face. What's interesting as well as they've got this, I think it's like a digital Sputnik. And I imagine it was just a bit too dark on his face. So they've just put that there just to lift it up a little bit. And you know, it's giving a little bit of highlight as well. And they're shooting this on film 35 millimeter. And these look like the Cook anamorphics. So that's pretty cool little simple shot. And these two floppies here. And then I imagine the sun is sort of bouncing into this roof. And then it was coming back and lighting him. So they've just covered them around the camera as well. So it's not front lighting him too much. Just so all of the light comes from this side of the line. Look at this cool guy here as well. He's just chilling in his Ray-Bans and his teal shirt. Oh, yeah, we're getting some good audio of this chicken. Alright, this is a quick one from a movie I found online called National Champions. Never heard of it. But anyway, this is a good idea if you're spending a lot of time in one room. You know, you might be shooting in there for multiple days. Instead of having lights with stands on them that you're constantly moving around, just rig up this truss sort of autopole system in the roof, and then put lights in every corner. And then you're sort of ready to go for anything. The gaffers on the iPad and they're sort of just dimming up and turning off the lights you don't want. And then you can just work so much quicker this way once you have this initial setup. So it looks like they've got them in every corner and then one row in the middle as well. So there's this shot of him. And then you've got these ones at the back that are on and then probably these ones around the side that are on here. And then we swing around to this shot. Then they would have turned off those ones that were backlighting him and then turn on these ones here. So they're backlighting these guys and him. So the lighting continuity doesn't really matter. It's pretty close, but it looks better for the shot. And then we're back on him. He's turned around and then these side lights are on here and the backlights are on and then maybe not so much these ones at the front. So you can work so quick just doing it this way. I thought that was a pretty interesting one to show. So initially it would take quite a while to set all that up. But then once you get going so quick, you can just turn them off and turn them on, get through the day a bit faster. This is a bit different. This is a music video shot by Marcel, the guy who shot Euphoria. And it's like this Titanic reference video where she saves a lobster or something. I don't know. But there's some good behind the scenes footage for it. So like 80% of the video is her in the corner of this dining room singing, which looks great. And you can see from this behind the scenes shot that they're using this hard ellipsoidal light as a spotlight on her. And then this sort of big light, maybe a HMI in the softbox next to that. And then you've got these windows here and that's just got a bunch of light coming in. And then we have an ultra bounce as the ceiling. So it's pretty simple little set, which is crazy because this is so much of the video, just her singing in this corner. And if you look at the behind the scenes footage, they built this massive dining room set. And I've just watched through the whole video. And I think I found three shots where we see the actual set. And there's a few closeup shots of the probably unpaid extras sitting in this dining room, but you can't really see the background. So it doesn't really matter where they are. So these are the shots that I found. There's this shot here, this one here, and this one here. And they're the only wide ish shots where you see this dining room for like five seconds worth maybe. And this shot looks like a comped in shot as well. That doesn't look like she's actually there. So I imagine they built this little set for her in this location somewhere. And then they've built this other huge dining room set somewhere else. And for the one shot, just comped her in. But it's just crazy how little this set gets featured for how detailed it is. Look at this. It's a burgundy carpet over here. You've got all this cornice and architrave. But you know, that basically sums up the film industry. Pay extras as little as possible and then build the most grand sets and feature them for five seconds. So and then there's a couple of other little cool miniature shots they did where they built the set again in miniature version. And then they sort of submerged it under the water. And you've got these Titan tubes for the lights coming in the windows, which is pretty cool. This is a little thing to note as well. When you're shooting miniatures, you got to shoot slow mo because everything moves so fast that it just doesn't look as real on camera shooting in 25 frames. You can see it here in this shot that doesn't look as good in real time. And then you see it in the video and it works a lot better when it's slowed down. All right, let's do one more of this movie called Last Night in Soho. So this is like 60s sort of disco scene. We've got this guy here, I don't know, is he the DP? But they have got this party style light, which is a bunch of gels cut out stuck on the back of this circle disc with the drill just spinning around and a torch going through it. It's such a good idea. I mean, you can only really do tight shots with this, which just seems to be what they're doing. Look at this guy. He's loving it. This guy might be the cinematographer. I don't know. They're shooting on film as well. Anamorphic 35 millimeter, which is this little readout here. And you can see that light, what it's doing. It looks great. And there's other little rig that they've made that she can dance in. Again, you know, this stuff only works on these really tight shots, but I imagine it's like a montage type scene or something. So let's try and pull the shot from the movie so we can see it in context.