The best films are ones that create immersive and believable worlds. Worlds that make you forget that you are watching a film, and make you feel like you are participating. There are many filmmaking techniques that aim to elicit this feeling in audiences. When it comes to cinematography and lighting, motivated lighting is perhaps the most fundamental.Understanding the value of a motivated light sources and how to create it will immediately make you a better cinematographer. In this article, we’ll analyze the function of this lighting style in filmmaking as well as what you need to know to create it.Continue…
The Academy Award for best cinematography is one of the most prestigious honors bestowed each year at the Oscars. The best cinematography Oscar has been around since the inception of the award ceremony but it underwent a great deal of experimentation and evolution in the early years.Continue reading Academy Award for Best Cinematography — Top 20 Winners
Knowing how to properly expose your shots is an obvious first step for becoming a photographer or cinematographer. We’ll lay out examples and visuals to answer what is overexposure in photography. But we’ll also take a look at why overexposing photos with intention sometimes works (sometimes doesn’t) and the ways in which you can break the rules to produce visuals that are uniquely yours.Continue reading What is Overexposure in Photography & How to Fix It
Light is the heart and soul of capturing a beautiful image. How we manipulate light and expose for it is partly artistic and partly technical. The latter utilizes specific techniques to accurately capture the image we envision. The term foot candle may raise a few questions. What is a foot candle exactly? What is the comparison to other light measurement units like lumens or lux? Let’s demystify the foot candle and take a look at how it applies to real world cinematography and photography.Continue reading What is a Foot Candle — How To Measure Light On Set
Many consider the Academy Award for Best Actress the greatest honor an actress can receive. Over the years, some of cinema’s finest actresses, like Meryll Streep and Elizabeth Taylor, have been given the award. We’re going to list every actress who has won the Academy Award for Best Actress, then we’ll rank some of their best performances. Continue reading Academy Award for Best Actress — Top 20 Winners Ranked
With new streaming platforms emerging every year and binge watching becoming an art form, the television industry needs more writers than ever. Unfortunately, there is also more competition than ever. Breaking into the TV industry can be tough, but here are the fundamentals you need to know about becoming a television show writer as well as some actionable tips that will help you get that much closer to writing for television.Continue reading Writing for Television — Format, Genre and Structure
You’ve written a script. You’ve polished it, re-written it, performed a table read, re-written it again, you’re sick of the thing. It’s time to let this thing hit the market. But what is the market? How much is a script worth? Is it a feature or TV? How much more do you get for hour-long vs half-hour. Thanks to the WGA schedule of minimums we have the answers to all this! But you don’t need to read the entire WGA minimums document, StudioBinder has all your answers right here. Continue reading WGA Minimums — Writers Guild Pay Rates Explained
Some say that when the editor does their job well, the audience is not supposed to notice. This does not mean that the editor’s job is unimportant. In fact, the complete opposite is the case. Editor’s are responsible for maintaining the illusion of a film and story by hiding the mechanisms at work. The main tool they have to do this is continuity editing.What is continuity editing in film? What are the techniques used to achieve continuity in film? Is there a place for discontinuity editing? We’ll answer all of these questions and more while highlighting some key examples in…
In the era of the digital format, many filmmakers utilize aspect ratio to help tell their story. Screening irregular aspect ratios onto traditional 16:9 screens both in theatres and on TVs require letterboxes. Creating your own letterboxes can be incredibly tedious. Luckily, there are free resources that make letterbox templates of all kinds available. In this article, we’ll take a look at one of the best free letterbox templates package and why it’s so useful to have. Continue reading Cinematic Bars — How to Add Black Bars to Video [Downloads]
When you get yourself a new digital camera, you have to choose between whether you want a crop sensor or full frame sensor. While one could easily say that the differences between the two are in their names (literally fuller frame vs cropped frame), there is a bit more to it than that. So as we dig into the full frame vs crop sensor world, we will talk about noteworthy differences, including which sensor could be best for you and the difference between full frame and crop sensor.Continue reading Full Frame vs Crop Sensor — Everything You Need to Decide
