PRE-PRODUCTION • Director of Photography | Research

I chose to be the director of photography (DOP) because I feel the over the course of the last two years my camera and lighting skills have increased greatly and I wanted to focus of those skills more in my final year. To fully immerse myself into being a DOP, it is important that I researched deeply into the role and what it would include.

Being a Director of photography "includes creating the visual identity, or look of the film/ tv programme, they work with the Director, camera crew and lighting department to achieve this and they manage all aspects of filming, from ordering and overseeing equipment to reviewing footage." (Creative Skillset, 2017)

My main tasks will include creating the overall look of Young & Famous and putting into play the vision of the director. I will be focussing the camera and lighting aspects of the role and make the technical decisions as well as some creative ones.

Framing: for this, I will work closely with the director to grasp the kinds of things they want for the show and if there are certain scenes that need to convey a specific feeling or tone, then from this I will work out what the best way to achieving this will be and how I will create these things using different types of framing and composition. This is will including testing different shot sizes to see how they work within the scene, getting across the chosen mood and tone. This is also important because the framing will convey feelings to the audience so they need to be accurately chosen to put across the correct thing. 

The Lighting is also another key aspect and something that I want to work on in detail as I believe this will be key to our production being visually successful. Lighting is key to production as it can easily portray a different mood or tone and without knowing anything about a production, you can guess the tone based on the lighting. During my research, I found that before colour films were available, lighting was so important because this allowed filmmakers to express different moods on screen. 

Colour links with the lighting in that my aim will be to use lighting as a way to colour a scene rather than do it all in post-production. I want to use different coloured gels to add different colours depending on what the director decided the mood of the scene is. I also plan to use natural lighting to light the majority of our scenes and then use the artificial lighting to highlight certain aspects of the scene.

Multi-Camera Filming will be one of the main things that I need to research into as this is likely to be my chosen method of filming. I want to look into how these shoots are typically done and how I can incorporate the traditional techniques of filming a sitcom into our productions as well as using more modern techniques that sitcoms have adopted which creating out own style for Young & Famous. 

Overall, my role is to turn the directors idea into images and translate their ideas for Young & Famous into the film. I will do this though the technical skills I already have and some that I want to develop and learn through workshops and test shoots. Working with a camera crew and the camera assistants I choose to make sure we work seamlessly to make thr filming of the production the best it can be.