Shane Hurlbut Talks the Art & Technology of Cinematography

Check out some of the awesome topics covered in the podcast


Shooting handheld vs. on a dolly or sticks
Working with scopes vs. your eye
The critical importance of a light meter
Lighting with the newest digital cameras
High frame rates
4K
Need for Speed – how he’s capturing it and what on
Knowing the role of a DP
“Lightmares”

BONUS – How to light & lens various story scenarios - Shane gets tested on the spot! Includes things like shooting a fight scene between lovers in a parked car, a character’s journey through their past, and shooting a country music video on a porch.

Shane Hurlbut Talks the Art & Technology of Cinematography

Shane brings up some truly astounding points in this conversation, but nearly all of them (from his theory on shooting handheld to his thoughts on modern digital cinema cameras) can be summed up in this one amazing tidbit of Hurlbut wisdom.

If you make every choice as a cinematographer based on the emotions of your characters – whatever he or she is going through – you will hit a home run every single time. It is your guiding light. Everything about cinematography is emotion.

This point is why it’s so crucial for cinematographers – and all filmmakers in general – to have an acute understanding of human emotion, and to be fully in-tune with the emotional context of the project on which they’re working. As mentioned in a recent article about filmmaking advice from John Hawks , one of the best ways to accomplish this is to immerse yourself in various art forms and to live a thriving life outside of the industry. It’s through means such as these that we can build the emotional and artistic skill-sets necessary to making the best possible artistic decisions on set.



Another major topic that the pair hit in their conversation is the debate on higher frame rates. On this subject, Shane presents his theory about how it’s part of the cinematographer’s job to lay a sort of “gauze” over the subject matter:

I think that so much of what we do as artists is about laying that “gauze” over the world that we’re creating. And even if you’re shooting a realistic type movie where it’s supposed to feel real and present, you’ve still gotta have that gauze. It’s the gauze that takes it from something just shot with a camcorder to a cinematic experience.

While some people will disagree, I’m with Shane on this one. Technology has gotten to the point where capturing an image at extremely high resolutions and frame rates is commonplace, but we often forget the fact that sometimes these technologies can hinder the suspension of disbelief, and that suspension has to be one of our top priorities as narrative filmmakers. While Shane says that film is still his favorite capture medium due to the organic look and feel (its inherent gauze, if you will), he also mentioned one of his favorite methods for creating that gauze with digital capture.