Research into Cinematography- Miss Miller

What is Cinematography in Film?

What is cinematography? The name comes from combining two Greek words: 'kinema',meaning movement, and 'graphein',meaning to record. In film, cinematography refers to the photography within the movie.  

In the hierarchy of a film set, the director's two key creative people in the crew are the art director and the cinematographer. The cinematographer is in charge of the camera, electric and grip departments. The camera department maintains the camera and has it ready for the shot while the grips and electrics handle the lighting. Electrics set the lights and run power to them and grips shape the light by using flags and diffusion.

Being a cinematographer means you are one of the most important people that will be hired for a film. The visual look of your film is heavily dependent on who you hire, having a different camera angle can interpret a whole different meaning to the audience.

(the art of photography and camerawork in film-making.)

This scene has a lot of typical thriller aspects you would except within a thriller film, which relates towards the audience. I decided to use this scene from the thriller film 'Nightmare on Elmstreet' as I thought it had a lot of conventions towards what makes a thriller film successful. It makes it successful by using different angles and positions to engage the audience and grab their attention towards a certain scene.The antagonist going after the protagonist making the victim extremely cautious and behaving in an abnormal manner. The start of the scene has Steadiucam movements and tracking positions, which suggests to the audience that everyone is well, nothing bad is happening; only sitting in a classroom being educated. As the camera moves around perfectly, instead of using handheld which interprets panic towards the audience, giving the impression that something extremely bad is happening.

This scene shows that the girl is very nervous and starting to become delusional, which explains why she thinks she is having real life dreams. The victim is starting to become frigity, while the camera movements still remain steady and calm. There is also a lot of panning towards the start of this scene, the camera is mainly remaining on the character of the victim but also having some characters and setting in the background. As she starts to suspect something is not going right in this dream of hers, there becomes more of extreme close up positions to show the fear within her face and builds tension towards the audience as there is more focus on her facial expressions and the background starts to blur. Known as shallow focus.

As the character starts to get scared and wants to wake up from this nightmare, all of the setting changes to what she fears to happen. There tends to be not a lot of close ups when she is in her nightmare, to show the horror in which she is situated in, which makes the audience feel sympathy towards her and become eager to see what will happen to her in this real life like dream. This is known as a long shot.

When she wakes up from the nightmare in a horrible scream, the camera is focused onto the background characters; showing their reaction to her behaviour, known as a extreme long shot, showing the importance of the worry all the characters have for the protagonist character. After the sudden scream, it turns to shallow focus on the character but not a close up, but having the characters a blurry figure but still seeing a slight part of worry in their body language. This makes the audience also feel a sense of worry within this scene, feeling sympathy for the audience.

Using these types of shots for the scene makes it very effective as it creates suspence and tension towards the audience as it is a very adnormal situation for the type of scenario that they are in. Being in a safe classroom, juxstaposing the fact that she believes she is in a dark deserted area in which she does not feel safe in. They are conventional towards the audience by always having the the camera view on eye level (Point of view) to make it seem more realistic towards the audience, as this scene is a highlyunrealistic scene to believe. Keeping the camera focus steady to create more effect and make it seem as if they are watching as a third person, in the situation with the victim, having to create a way out instead of observing it.