The Mark of Quality - Shallow Depth of Field

There are many things that add to the quality and production value of films. One of these things in particular is often confused or misunderstood, and that is the effect of using a shallow depth of field. Of course there are a lot of other things which can add a huge difference to the quality of your film, but by using depth of field effectively helps bring your film out of that amatuer/student look just that much more.

One of the most common words I used to hear around film shoots was depth of field. "Give me some good depth of field", or "I want to have really deep depth of field around this character". This is a common misinterpretation, as having a deeper depth of field just means that more things will be in focus. Its when you severely limit or have a shallow depth of field that you get the nice blurring of objects surrounding the object in focus.

The main reason a shallow depth of field works to your advantage are two-fold. First, it makes the image more visually interesting, as it is a technique used more on bigger more professional productions. Secondly, it eliminates any extraneous detail from the picture and makes it lot more similar to how the human eye focuses. Human eyes can only focus on one area of interest at a time, and even when scanning a whole room or area the eye jumps focus from spot to spot, instead of taking in the whole scene as a whole. By introducing a shallow depth of field to the shot, it tells the audience exactly what to look at and what is important, since they can't see anything else in great detail. They must automatically focus on what is on focus.

Of course, with most consumer or pro-sumer grade cameras it can be hard to achieve a shallow depth of field without using some tricks. The main reason for this is both the sensor and lens size, as having a larger sensor or film size automatically makes shallower depth of fields easier to achieve. 35mm and 70mm film often gives the best results, since the film sizes are absolutely huge compared to their digital counterparts. The 35mm film is roughly 1 1/3 inches, and 70mm 2 3/4 inches wide. By comparison, most digital sensors are either 1/8 or 1/4 inch which is a huge difference, with some of the more improved and new sensors being 1/2 inch.

Often the only way to bring out a shallow depth of field with these tiny digital sensors is by physically moving the camera far away from the subject you wish to film, then zooming in as far as possible. A tripod comes in handy for using this technique, because the more zoom you're using the shakier the image is going to be. Once you achieve good focus on your subject, you should find that there is a shallow depth of field. Another technique is by shooting in slightly darker conditions, and opening the iris as far open as it will go. Using both these techniques compresses the image onto the sensor, which helps to limit the depth of field.

As you can see with both techniques, it may not always be possible to achieve good results. Sometimes you simply can't move the camera back any further, or perhaps you have to shoot on a bright sunny day. The only remedy to this is to either plan your production to try and make it easier to get shallower depths of field, or simply use a camera with a larger sensor size.

Here are a few examples of shallow depth of field in my own work:

Good Film Tips - Characters are Paramount

Image courtesy of LouLou - echslectir

This is perhaps one of the most important areas of story creation behind the story itself. Characters are what make a story live and breathe, and quite simply if you have a film full of characters no one is interested in or can relate to, it isn't going to leave a good impression. Having well developed and interesting characters is one of the most important aspects of writing, but many writers often skimp on detail when it comes to them. There are some important things to remember when it comes to incorporating quality characters in your writing, and I have taken the liberty to mention a few things below.

1. Characters should be as important as story
While it is paramount to come up with a really good story that will hold audiences interesting, not having some good characters to back this up can mean trouble. You could have the most interesting story in the world, but with bad characters people aren't going to be half as interested. A lot of writers, myself included, tend to concentrate a lot on the story. The characters become a means to use to make sure everything thats supposed to happen in the story happen. If you're not careful, they become placeholders and tools of the changes that happen in the story without really being their own entity. Sometimes it might be useful to think of the characters as being separate from the story, but yet placed into the story with all their individual reactions and thoughts. Adding importance to the development and back stories of all your main characters can really add a lot of depth to your writing, giving it a lot more intrigue and draw.

2. Characters should be captivating and unique
One of the main purposes of characters is to hold the audiences interest. One of the easiest ways to do this is to make characters captivating. Usually the way to do this is to have researched, well developed personalities for the characters, incorporating very distinctive and recognizable differences between them which makes both their actions and dialogue unique from one another. You don't want all of your characters to act and talk exactly the same, you want to make them as different as humanly possible. It adds variety and spice, and also adds interest to see how different characters react to situations and events differently, or even how they interact with each other.

3. Characters should be unpredictable and original
Another big mistake of writers is tapping into stereotypes too much. This is even encouraged in a lot of books teaching writing skills, as they believe playing into stereotypes makes it easier for audiences to understand characters. Not only does this make characters boring and predictable, it can give audiences the feeling you're treating them as if they were stupid. A clever way to get around this, while still using most of the advantages, is by playing against stereotypes or making characters entirely unpredictable. Alfred Hitchcock was a well known for incorporating this method into his films for both the characters and plots. Playing against stereotypes can in itself be predictable if you use the most common ones, for example the ditzy pretty girl who actually has brains, the harsh and strict teacher who has heart in the end, or the rich miser who is actually very generous. However if done well playing against stereotypes can actually be really effective.

To begin with, utilizing the stereotype in the first place makes the character recognizable to the audiences. For example a nerdy guy that wears glasses (of course) and has a large knowledge of all technical subjects. Audiences can recognize and perhaps even understand such a character, because they have seen this many times before in other films. But to really throw them off and keep them guessing, and to make the character more original, you can add some plays against this predictable stereotype. Maybe he is especially gifted in social interactions, especially with women. This throws off some of the assumptions that typically go with the nerd stereotype. Maybe he is also especially good at some kind of physical activity, like sword fighting or martial arts which might come in particularly handy at one point in the story. If you keep your audience guessing it will keep them engaged in both the story and characters. Playing against stereotypes can make characters much more original and interesting, as well as throwing off audiences assumptions so they won't fall into too much of a relaxed state watching the film.

4. The audience should care about what happens to them
This one is also rather important. You can have the characters as interesting and original as you like, but if they are either intentionally or unintentionally unlikable then people are going to have difficulty caring about what happens to them. Of course I'm not recommending not using anti-hero's or characters that are intentionally pricks, because these ones can be interesting as well. At the very least you must make the characters human, so other humans will care about what happens to them in the story. All of the dramatic points and struggles in your story will loose both their meaning and effect if the audience can't relate to your characters. You have to remember that if audiences don't care what happens to the characters, they're not going to care about the struggles or obstacles you're placing in front of them. On the flipside, however, if they are actively engaged then they will be hanging on every moment you're putting the character into dangerous or tricky situations. If audiences are engaged in the characters then they will be engaged in your story.

A good example of movies that should absolutely having characters you care about in is horror films. If you don't care about the characters, you're not going to care if they slowly get killed off one by one. The Scream trilogy used this really well by having interesting characters that you honestly didn't want getting killed off by the masked killer. If only more horror films would learn how effective this is, instead of creating cardboard cutout characters that audiences couldn't care less about if they happened to get killed along the way.

In conclusion if you have both a good story and good characters, you have the best of both worlds and a great foundation on which to build your film around. Don't let character development fall into the background in story development, good characters are absolutely paramount in making a good film.

Slow Times in Tahoe

Well time is passing as per usual, but not a whole lot of things are happening at the moment. It warmed up here for about a week, and we saw temperatures of around plus 5 degrees Celsius which was a nice change, before they dropped down once again and the snow returned. I'm sure spring will roll around at some point, or at least I certainly hope it will.

I haven't been feeling entirely productive lately, with work taking up most of my time at the moment. I want to get a lot of things started and get to work on various items, but its slightly difficult at the moment to find both the space and time to do them. Just before I arrived here the basement which I was supposed to move into flooded, so all the new floor boardings and parts of the wall had to be taken out. Three months later, absolutely nothing has happened towards the progress of the basement apart from it being dried out. Once the basement is finally completed, if ever, I plan to set up a desk and area where I can actually work on things and feel productive.

Some areas I plan to focus some attention on are adding more content to the website, reading some more and most importantly getting started on some writing, which unfortunately I have neglected for some time. I have a couple of script ideas I want to work on, and at the moment have only been coming up with some ideas for the stories.

In other news I may be visiting Japan for a couple of weeks in the next two months, which would be an interesting trip. If I do end up going I'll make sure to bring that old Practika camera of mine and take lots of photos. I've never been to a place where the culture is so different from what I'm used to, so I'm sure that would be an interesting experience. Plus they have pretty good food over there so I'm sure I'd be happy in that regard.