Cinematography and Visual Storytelling - Jeremy and Cedar Vickery

Hello everyone. Welcome to another live stream with Jeremy Vickery and Cedar Vickery, two fantastic human beings who joined us yesterday for another stream where we talked uh some things about um what is cheating in art. It wasn't about AI, but oh boy, did the people in the comments decide to make it about AI. But today we're going to be talking about composition, which is another component that they go over in the course that they made together. uh one half of that is about using a camera for the purposes of creating art uh creating references or possibly even using those for a short film. And today we'll be talking about cinematography which I think applies pretty directly to making a short film. — Yes, — absolutely. — I mean from the comments it was interesting yesterday just to interact as a community. There were some people that were like only you know paintings are real art. So, if you're here and you're expecting to learn about traditional painting, you're in the wrong stream. You can go ahead and leave now because I've worked for almost 30 years in movies and games and you know that type of realm. That's what I'm helping people to make. So, instead of saying I'm an artist, I go like I'm a visual storyteller. I help people make movies and games. That's where we're at and we want to help you. If you're interested in making movies and games, then you're absolutely in the right place. And we want to really talk about cinematography and visual storytelling and kind of like peel back the layers of how it's all made because a lot of us have a visual language that's subconscious like you've everybody now in the world unless you live in some tribal forest somewhere. You've seen movies and you see social media and you see YouTube channels and like we're absorbing so much and there's just like a subconscious language that we're used to, but you might not be used to it up here. You might just down in your subconscious and that's what we want to like talk about today. — Yeah, [clears throat] I think it's going to be a great time. And for a person who normally comes to a live stream here, you might normally see us talk about something that's kind of like a little bit headier, maybe really digging in on color theory, and then you find yourself whipping out the sketchbook to take some notes or something. That's might still be useful for you today. But we're making it easy on you guys because we're going to be going through some video clips from some different pieces of media. Some that uh have been made by people who got paid so much money to do it and then some that are made by these people here who you can pay money to learn how they did it. So yeah, stay around. Um we're going to go through a couple different animated movies. Well, one animated movie and two movies that use some visual effects in some spots. — So let's uh let's dig into it. How do you want to start this topic today? jump right into showing anything or — Yeah, let me start with the screen share. I'm just going to show some things because we were talking yesterday about photography. So, I just want to show you that some people really resist using photography as reference. But let's say you want to build a still life and you don't want to rip something off of Google and you want to make a still life. You could do this with your own eyes, you know, but like learning to how to make something that's compelling and looks classic. you want to make a painting, you need to learn how to set this up and how to light it. So, that's part of what the photography course is like, how do you make things that are paintable? Build your own references that aren't stealing online. So, I have a whole bunch of things of like here's a bunch of, you know, how to shoot portraits and how to light faces and how to capture moments out and about in the world and how to, you know, do street photography or, you know, capturing all kinds of moments and understanding how cameras work. Um, I've got some, you know, information on environment, landscape photography and nighttime photography and capturing just a variety of things. So that like if you have photography like this as your reference and then you built an illustration using this, that's part of the skill. Half of this course is like how do you use a camera? How do you find that time of day and the perfect, you know, situation to make things that are really beautiful, you know, and to, you know, like I could use this as a base for an illustration that's foggy and spooky, but this was based off of a real photo that I took. Um, anyhow, this is kind of like how do we capture animals? um you know fastmoving objects, slowmoving objects, little tiny objects, you know this just you how do we do things at nighttime you know and capturing stars and uh light painting and there's so many different things that we can do and then eventually we get into cinematography and crafting visual storytelling and this is what we're going to talk about today is mostly this but I just wanted to give a little bit of a background of what we talked about yesterday and what photography can do. — Mhm. — And [snorts] I'm just going to bring up one thing here real quick. I do want to make sure that people know just what we're talking about real fast. Uh so I'm going to share this screen here. We're talking about this course right here. Uh this is one that you can pick up if

you are interested. It comes in two parts. Yesterday we talked about that first part like Jeremy said. Today we're talking about specifically the cinematography side of things. So just want to let you guys know. Now Jeremy. — Yeah. — Take it away. — Yeah. — Okay. So, Cedar, why don't you describe the difference between photography, [snorts] videography, and cinematography? Especially like we already just covered photography, but let's talk about videography tends to be more like just casual, you know, you're shooting family or you're doing like a travel video or the more day-to-day normal things. And cinematography is specifically about storytelling. It's, you know, movies and things where you're using the cameras more than just capturing what's real, but you're crafting it into a specific visual story. Yeah, there is a big difference there between these two because I think the term cinematography is something that is a confusing term and especially when people say cinematic. What does cinematic mean? Like, oh, there's that's as potent of a topic as like art. — I hear that all the time. It kills me. Uh what they really mean is like we considered lighting and maybe it has film grain more often than not and that's such a bummer. — Yeah. So like how do we do cinematography? I think yeah like what you said intention you are crafting something with intention like my definition between videography is capturing the real world and then finding a story in it. So, you go to an event and you do a wedding, you, you know, you're at a family party or whatever, or even reality TV. You you're almost like just there capturing as much as you can and then you find a story out of it, add some drama, throw some chairs, you know, reality TV, that type of stuff. Um, — cinematography is you're thinking ahead, you're planning ahead, you are choosing how to tell this story, you're changing the lighting in particular. You're not just using available light. You are guiding the craft. You are choosing the lenses and crafting this. And I think there's a lot of there's a blurred line between being a writer, being a director, and being an editor, and how all of those go together. And if you have a small studio, I think even wanting to get into this realm, it's important to kind of try all of these things and to learn how to do it. So like Cedar, you've shot a bunch of films. — Yeah, lots and lots of films uh independently done started with lots of short films and then took on some bigger more ambitious projects as well. So and because they've been independent, a lot of them have like I've done a bit of everything for the whole production process. So it's helpful to be able to like have that overlap of different skills. And you know, writing is going to have a big impact on how you're going to shoot it and how you shoot it has a big impact on how you edit it. So, there's a lot of overlap between all of the different aspects of it. I think before we really break down like K-pop Demon Hunters and some of the scenes from that, — I do feel like the talking about the, you know, like what is the point like how of the storytelling, you know, um there are certain things that we want from a scene. Um — yeah, this is true. — I mean, I guess we could just jump in and — I feel like we just — Let's discover it along the way with pretty visuals. — Yes. Okay. [clears throat] — All right. So, I'm going to go ahead and uh put the screen back up here. All right. So, yeah, like you said, this is from K-pop Demon Hunters, a movie that most of you out there have probably already seen. — Netflix, Sony, — don't copyright strike us. Thank you. We love this movie. I think it's really amazing. And so, what we've done is we've just taken — three little scenes from it. I'm gonna let Cedar drive and kind of let's talk about this first from a writing standpoint and a storytelling standpoint. So to start out with we the first scene we were kind of looking at is right at the beginning kind of there's this initial airplane battle and we think that you know commonly you would expect you know if we're going to talk about a scene it's going to be some flashy really exciting scene but we actually want to talk about more really simple cinematography just like what's the core foundations rather than starting with something that has lots of really crazy camera angles. and getting sucked into really complicated different things. [snorts] — Um so we actually the scene that we really want to talk about less than um you know this really high tier stuff we want to start really simple really basic just what's the core foundations of different shot types that are used and how different transitions are done. So, the scene we really want to look at, let me scroll over to it, um, is here. This scene where they first meet the tiger, if you've seen the movie, uh, really fun character. — Um, so

— there there may be some light visual spoilers here. Yes, people who haven't seen this movie, but judging from the viewership numbers that people have talked about, chances are you out there have probably already seen this or are familiar with the things that we'll discuss here. We're not going to get in like — crazy deep minutia. It's safe. — If you hate spoilers, and we're not giving away any big spoilers here, but if you hate spoilers, — then jump out of the stream, wait, go watch the movie, and then come back and rewatch this because this will be online in a couple of hours. — Yeah. But I do want to make one more comment before we dive into this scene. Like Cedar was saying, a good analogy for this is like if you're going to learn to play guitar, you're probably not going to get into like really advanced classical guitar on your first day. You're going to learn basic chords. You know, like if you're going to get in drawing, you're probably not going to be like, I'm going to design the main character from a video game and all of their props as my first drawing. It's like, why don't you just design a teapot first? So that's what we're doing with cinematography is like we didn't want to take the fancy scene because — big action setpiece music video type thing that has lots of really crazy camera moves because it can get overwhelming and hard to — Yeah. And I see so many demo reels of people that do what we call the vomit cam, which is like a roller coaster camera where they're like, "It's my first shot I've ever made in 3D. " So, I have this like flying camera through the world and you zoom into the character's eyeball and then zip pan back and like, — "No, no, no, no. Why don't you master just basic storytelling first and then work up to that? " And then once you worked up to that, you'll realize you don't want that anyway. — Yeah, this is true. — Okay, so let's break down these scenes. Let's start with just a basic uh story overview of just like what's going on in these scenes. So Roomie basically sees this weird little bird with a hat, comes and investigates it, finds out, uh oh, it's like a demon bird. Comes around here. Ah, there's an evil, you know, thing, but comes out and actually this tiger is friendly. Um, and there's a message and kind of sees this message. And then later in the next scene, it's another scene with the same tiger cat that we're going to break out — later in the movie. We cut some stuff out. — Yeah. Just to like talk about these two scenes. Then this room, um, she's like kind of changing some lyrics, trying to figure out, you know, different revelations, but she's not quite ready to confront her friends with different stuff yet that she's going through emotionally. Um, — and so she's trying to hide all of this, you know, demon tiger stuff uh from her friend, but you know, like, are you lying to me? Is kind of like, you know, what the friend is saying. and um she's like, "No, I'm not lying at all. " But even though there's the cat right behind her that she's sitting on. Scene has good tension and drama in it. It's really fun, charming scene. But from an actual cinematography standpoint, it's very simple but effective type cinematography for these two scenes. Particularly the second one, uh is a really good one to start with. Um — classic cinema storytelling tools. Yeah. — Mhm. [clears throat] — This scene has like a very standard thing. So, this first shot right here is an establishing shot. Basically, if you jump straight into the characters and what's going on, the audience doesn't really understand like where are we? You know, environmentally, you want to be able to communicate to that what building are these characters in? Where is this scene taking place? That's important to [clears throat] spend a little bit of time, just a couple seconds. So, this first shot, we're in their Huntrix custom building that they own or whatever. And then we have another establishing shot. This is for the interior of this building. We see we're at this building. We're in this bedroom. And this gives us information about the layout of the room. Where are each of the characters relative to each other? You have this bed. You have this chair, the lamp, you have the tiger, the two characters in here. So, it just helps give that information. — Oh, real quick, I want to insert something. Composition. A lot of people think of composition being this complex thing that you have to learn a whole series of the M composition, Z composition, X Y plus composition, you know, all these type of things. It we can simplify this down into what's the point? What are you looking at? How do you draw attention? — So like composing these shots, the point of those first two shots is tell the audience where we are. — Yeah. — The edge. — Choosing a wide shot to tell that story. an example an extension of this if you guys are okay with it is in comics the thing that you see all the time whether that's manga or if that's western comics uh a character you show where a character is you establish like you said uh cedar the location of where they are from the macro to the micro um you say like you know earth uh this building this room — and once you've established that in comics you can just entirely drop the background away have no background

detail whatsoever and you already know all the information that you need for that and then you just focus on the character. The same thing is happening in cinematography. It's just that by the very nature of it being the medium that it usually is. You have a background that exists. You're not dropping it away because you're not drawing it, you know. — And that ties in perfectly with uh a concept of if you know theater is a big element of film making as well. That's where it gets a lot of its origins from. And in theater, the audience is static. They're just sitting in their chair. They're looking up at the stage. They don't move around at all. So, you have to do a lot of work in theater with acting to be very bold and expressive so that you can see what's going on. They even do like makeup so that your facial expressions are more clear. And they have to be very expressive so you can just understand what's happening because you're so far away from the actors. And in film, one of the big advantages of cameras is that you can move the camera around. And the power of cinematography is being able to choose what does the audience see and what do they not see. So, kind of like you were mentioning, if we have a shot like this closeup right here, there is the background, but it's all blurred out and it's just very simple shapes. So, we can just kind of see there's a wall here and a bit of a light, but otherwise, we only see this character's face and the facial expressions. So that's the kind of power of choosing when you show what and being very intentional with that focal point to draw the audience's attention to important story moments. [snorts] Um, so yeah, in this scene we kind of see what is she interacting with this piece of paper and the pen and then we go back to this kind of wider shot of the room and then we see this crossing out the lines. Uh, again, another closeup and really just choosing exactly where that camera is. — She has nice handwriting. Yeah, — there's there's some uh some other things that are happening in here that are my favorite things uh in video editing uh for composition. Uh we'll get more into it during the other scene where we have our first meeting uh the tiger whose name is uh has been decided to be Derpy. — I know guys love that. — Yeah, but yeah, we'll talk about it more. But there are lead lines that are happening here like composition wise. Uh the actions that are happening when something moves in a direction so many of the scenes in here they h they continue that the motion of it. — Yeah. — It's wonderful. — Yeah. That's where when we break this down, I want to go from the biggest thing which is what's the story, then what's the lensing, then the leading lines and the compositional tricks, — then the, you know, and the flow. So we'll talk about uh eye flow which is a concept of how your eye looks on screen between shots which includes something called the 180 degree rule which is again a foundational skill of basic cinematic storytelling that so many artists so many illustrators and concept designers jump into making comics and they don't know about these basic tools that can really make it easier for your audience to understand. — So that's why we want to talk about it. — Yeah. [snorts] — Yeah. It's the stuff that like you said like uh at the top you don't know that you know already, — right? — Yeah. I mean even just like don't know that you know is like basic cuts is just having you're seeing this thing and then suddenly the video switches to another angle and that is used so much in any kind of video that it should be extremely intuitive. Um, but knowing exactly where you place that cut to maintain momentum between shots like you were talking about. — Um, the in this scene, all of the shots are very static. But if we wanted to go back to kind of this scene where walking around the corner and having, you know, the bird walking that direction, following the camera moves with [snorts] kind of having that like flow between different uh camera angles, camera movement as well as an element, not just having the camera static looking at one thing. Um, with this scene, an important thing that's set up here when we first meet is, uh, this tiger character is trying to get the pot back up. And that's kind of like a funny [clears throat] moment. And it kind of establishes the character of like, uh, oh, I knocked something over, but trying to correct it. — And that becomes really important in this other scene, — which is why we picked them together. So, it's kind of how the different scenes blend together. Setup and payoff is from a storytelling perspective important. So, um, [snorts] there's more close-ups

here, and then, uhoh, the friend's coming in, uh, trying to hide everything. And then kind of the tension is the bucket gets knocked over, and that comes back with, uh, oh, the cat wants to write the thing, put it back up. — The beauty, — which adds tension. — The beauty of good storytelling here is the little joke of the knocked over can relieves some of the tension of this scene. Like if that wasn't in there, — it wouldn't be as engaging because you got two things happening at once and the tension between them and one is really funny serious. — You could make the scene serious, but I love that type of storytelling. — Yeah. Different things together. — Okay. [clears throat] So, there is one thing. Do you want to keep going with this? — I think we kind of broke down the main different shot types, the differences between zooming in on different things. If you learn about cameras, you can start making assumptions. Like Stephen, I know you and I have geeked out about camera type stuff too because I have so much experience with a real camera. Like this is another reason why you as an artist should learn about cinematography. Even if you decide never to do it yourself, if you can learn about it and a director says, "I want an 85 millimeter shot, you know, flat shot with onepoint perspective of this wall, you know, or I want a super wide. " Like, if we break this scene down again, we can look at this and say, "All right, this to me is probably like a 35 millimeter from a distance. This one's maybe a 24. It's pretty wide in the room. You can see a lot of some of the perspective in there. And then this is probably like a 50 or 70 millimeter, you know, from a distance because of the amount of blur. — Go into what those numbers mean a bit. — Yeah. — So, we do have um we took some images and this is in the course where we actually break this down. So, we show this. Let me just do this. So, these are shots of cedar with different lenses. And again, this is all part of the course so that you can learn even if you don't want to buy all these lenses, you can say this is these are close-up shots with the different lens types. So 12 millimeter is fisheye — and the millimeter is how much the there's two different lenses in a camera and it's the distance between those lenses which affects how zoomed in it is. — Yeah. — So this is super wide fisheye. Notice what's happening to the background too. So it's almost like he's actually not moving at all. I am just moving the camera. So, he looks his nose looks weird. You can't see his ears. — And the camera is like this distance from my face. Like we're really close — inches away. — Wide [clears throat] shot. Then he's getting further and further back with each shot. — 35 50 is actually between 35 and 50 depending, you know, on, you know, technical details. But — sensor and stuff, — right? This is what the human eye sees. So between these two, this is kind of what you're used to seeing. And if you're painting as an artist, this is basically the realm of what you're going to paint from real life. But you should know how to do extreme forcehortening because it's used in cinema all the time. — And then we get into like these are zoom lenses. 70 150. Notice that background building is getting bigger and bigger. And Cedar's face is flattening out and you can see more of his ears. 300 millimeter zoom 600 millimeter. like this is I'm really far away from him to get him to be the same kind of framing in the frame. — That's another thing to talk about and we won't go deep into this today, but shot types versus lenses. So lenses are like he's in frame where you see from his, you know, armpits up to the top of his head in all of these shots. So I have framed him kind of the same even though the lenses are different and it really makes his face warp in different ways. Um so these are all the things that we want to learn. We want to talk about you know how do we use these for storytelling. — Absolutely. Yeah. I think the one of the things that I that people come up against a bunch is the idea of it sounding really technical to think about um the like what your lens is doing because if you say like a 12 m millimeter lens but a person hasn't had the experience to use those things. It sounds so technically ownorous and so expensive to even possibly consider but these are also essentially the things that you have on your phone. Most of us have a phone that has more than one lens on it um that we bounce between all the time and those things you already have a familiarity with those uh in the in that situation. You can just think of what your phone says. I think my phone says let's see here. Um I have it set so I actually choose between the lenses. It's the ultra wide, the wide, and the telephoto. — Uh and that's just what that language is. There's a range that considered the ultra wide, the wide, and the telephoto. And so if you just want to start making films with your phone, which is 100% viable in this day and age, uh you can just think of them in that

kind of way. There are some differences between the lenses that make up those ranges, but for right now, just think of them as the ultra wide, the wide, and telephoto that you already know. about making films with uh just your phone. In the first part of the course about how to make short film, cinematic storytelling is me just going through like if you just have a phone, how do you make a really basic short film as well? So, I kind of cover — and I want to talk for a minute before we jump back into the you know this short and analyzing this. I think one of the biggest mistakes people do when they're learning film making and you've probably Let's see if you as an audience relate to this. I'm gonna make a story and there's two ways it can go. It can either be too simple, you know, and it's just like this is a person kicking a ball and it's like, well, that's boring. Or we get the other type of nerdism that are like, well, 10,000 years ago the armies of Eldrith came upon the armies of this other place, you know, like we go way too deep with it too fast. So, we go to make short films and we're like, "Someone's tied to a tree in the forest and it's weird and there's this dripping goo and like, wait, wait, wait. Okay, how do we tell a basic story that will actually relate to people, you know, — and so that's important, too. Basic ideas and then slowly build it from there. So, we give somewhat of the path of like how do you get started in film making? How do you do this with one person? Now add two people. Now add four people. now add a little bit more equipment and you know work your way through this so that you can eventually get to where you're making big animated films or big you know liveaction films or cinematics in your video game. I mean so many people have this idea of like I want to make my own graphic novel. I want to be a game director. I want to make my own video game. Like learn these skills. It's gonna make it so much better. — Yeah. Okay. So, if we go back to the course, I guess the next thing that I would love to talk about is iFlow. So, C, do you want to break? — Yeah. — The flow of this. — Let's freaking do it. This is the best thing, guys. This is quite actually my favorite thing. Uh, every single YouTube short that you've seen on Proco has this considered in it thoroughly. Even though some of it's academic content and everything, this is, I think, one of the greatest things that's come from uh modern cinematography. It was already present in classic cinematography, but once you see this, you'll never unsee it. — And it's funny how many artists have no clue what we're talking about right now. — Yeah. It's it's just the like we're going to see it in practice. You're already using it in some way when you make a composition that you really like that with lead lines and things. This is just another version of that kind of idea. — Let's see it. — Okay. So, for this scene that we've been talking about, um the at the start of the scene, um there's not uh there's only just like the one character at this point. So, it's not as much important in these moments. So, we'll really start with once um we have the second character walk into the room. — Oh, wait. But wait, go back because there is something here. Go back to the beginning here. Notice she's on screen, right? And the tiger is on her left in like on physically on the frame. Now zoom into the next shot. — She's on the right and the tiger is technically on the left. So like choosing where on screen characters are keeping that consistent. So even though we don't see the tiger, we know the tiger. And here it is. She's on screen right. The tiger's on screen left. So they're already establishing this idea of where are the characters in the frame relative to one another. which is important. She's on — plays right, left, keeping characters consistent on frame and that's important for the positioning of you're seeing into this little world or whatever from this limited perspective and making sure that the audience doesn't get confused — where [clears throat] characters are relative to each other. — So, keeping that consistent is a powerful tool to try and limit confusion. Um, and then I think it gets more in interesting once we have kind of they walk around each other which kind of like starts to change things. But even as moving around the room, we still keep roomies on the right, mirrors on the left between every single shot. — Well, that one breaks the rule a little bit here, but the camera flips around. Yeah, — they do flip. Now, see, this is where these are tools, not rules. Um, it helps. I think beginner cinematographers just randomly place cameras. They're like, "Oh, I'm going to do an over the shoulder shot. " But choosing which shoulder you go over has a again, this

is where the topic of like where do you put the characters? And it can be broken, but as a general means we have this thing. You want to describe the 180 rule that was kind of hard to understand. — Yeah. Yeah, I mean the 180 rule is that you draw a line between the characters and you try and keep the camera on the same side of that line. Um, so yeah, if you imagine that, — so if there's a camera over here that's pointed this way and like if I draw this from the top and just say like here's the two characters, there's a line between them and the camera is kind of like looking this way. In general, the camera can move anywhere 180 degrees this way as long as it's pointing towards the characters. You don't really want to flip over the line. — And that will maintain the whole this character always stays on the right, left. And that's just a general rule of thumb that's often talked about. But, you know, there's plenty of times where, of course, the example here where they do actually break it a little bit. um here. But I think, you know, there's certain times where you have something that's more important than the 180 rule. Like in this case, we really want to be able to see the uh cat's hand reaching out. — Yeah. And the only way to frame that in this way would be to break that a little bit. So there's plenty of times where like knowing where to break it — and where to follow it [snorts] — with clarity being the key. I mean, like, when do you follow the rule? When do you not follow the rule? And like, well, do you still understand what's happening? Then you can break it. If it makes it where it's confusing, don't break it. — Yeah. [clears throat and snorts] — So, I mean, definitely also like if you have like a wider angle where you can see more of the environment, it's less important to follow. But if you have if you're using a lot of close-ups where you only see one character, — that's in particular where it can be really confusing. So this — she's on the right, she's on the left, but there is this transition shot where like she's still on the right, left, but she walks in this frame and switches. So that 180°ree line between them that's going this way changes to going this way — during the [clears throat] shot. So she walks over and now well I mean this one sort of breaks the rule a little bit but we do establish that she had kind of like walked from over here to over here and now you have a new 180°ree rule between them. — Yeah. As long as it as long as like you said, Cedar, if there's something else that grounds it that gives them that gives the viewer like something to be able to pull the idea from for where everything else is moving around in some way, then it's okay if you start pushing against that rule a little bit or not necessarily adhering 100%. They just have to have something that keeps them in that one place the whole time. Yeah, because it does that kind of flipping back and forth. One thing that can be useful to do, and it's not done here, but it is useful to have if you have a direction of movement — between a cut, because one of the problems with cuts is that you're suddenly moving the camera somewhere else very suddenly. Just instantly, it kind of teleports into a different spot. And that can be very kind of jarring is a problem that can often happen. So when putting together shots uh and doing video editing, part of it is choosing to have that momentum pass where even though the camera angle is changing, the movement of the characters does not change and you keep that flow between shots. — That's why we call it eye flow is like feeling the flow. And we do this with edits and cuts. And we do it I mean there's an interesting conversation about how to edit these things. Like how do you shoot this? How do you edit this? And I heard something years ago that I really like which is conversational editing. So there's a conversation that's happening between these two characters and it's a tense conversation in this scene. So when do you cut? How do you know how to cut? And like, well, just imagine yourself if you were in the room and if one person's saying something and then you want like if you were watching your friends have an argument in front of you and your one of your friends says, you know, I just killed your mom. You know, they would be like, what? You're going to look over to the other friend to get their reaction. It's like that's exactly when you want to cut. [clears throat] — What's happening? Where would you look if you were there? If you were watching this conversation and using that as part of the eye flow of choosing. So this is writing, directing, shooting, and editing where they all overlap beautifully. So why it's important to learn all three of these skills. — And we're not showing audio here, but one thing you can do as well is you're looking at the person who's not

currently speaking. And you have that you hear something before you see it happen can be a nice way, as I was saying, easing into those cuts. even though you're moving the camera abruptly, if you kind of hear what's about to happen before you see it happen, that's another technique that's used often. — Well, — yeah. And so, I don't know, did you guys want to use the scene that happens where she first meets Derpy for any other particular goal? Because I think it's a fantastic one for eye trace. — Yep. Okay. So, we come in. What's interesting with this one is that we don't do an establishing shot. — Yeah, I think it's important to eventually have an establishing shot uh somewhere early in the scene, like the first couple seconds of a scene, but sometimes a useful technique is to actually start with the close-up. So, this is an example of this scene starts with um Roomie like going, "Wait, what's that? " You notice that kind of like, "Wait, what's what am I seeing? " and then you see a kind of point of view shot of this bird out in the window and then investigating moving forward again. So there's not necessarily much of an establishing shot here. — Um and that can way to like ease into the next scene of like you start with zoom in and then you kind of expand out and then that [clears throat] — Stephen did you have something? Yeah. I So, the thing I really like about this one is things being center weighted and they make this intentional choice between having the center weight and when they split that center weight into a wide that's represented by like two and then go back to the one. They do it with scale — uh and so much of it is center is that the center weighted thing. It's you can make these super fast cuts because a person doesn't have to change where their eye is ever. They already have all the information that they need. It's a really cool thing you can do with intention and it works wonderfully for short form content. — Yeah. — I mean, if you that is part of the — where is your eye on the screen at any one point and making sure that whenever you're placing a cut that the audience doesn't have to like whiplash their eyes across the screen because that can be like eye straining. It can be physically hard. So, knowing when to like how do you drag the audience's eye across the screen, cut, drag it back, cut. — [snorts] — It's interesting that this works with the two extreme ends of media, too, because short form content, Tik Tok videos, they're so incredibly fast and the cuts are crazy fast with it. or if you're in a giant IMAX movie theater, you physically can't move your head, you know, and it's like when you're sitting and watching a movie on your computer screen, it doesn't matter quite so much because [clears throat] — it's not quite as choppy as like a Tik Tok and it's not quite as big as IMAX, but it still matters. And what's interesting is that we form a cinematic language. Like I think if you plucked somebody out of 1890 and had them watch a movie, they would be so confused. — Oh, yeah. It's like if someone goes back to watch like if someone from now who's been fed a steady diet of current media, if they go back to watch something like even something that's pretty dynamic for back in the day, uh like Metropolis, — Yeah. — it would still be a jarring experience where they're like, "Why why am I not getting my like my Pringles can of new scene, new scene? — So slow. Why aren't they editing? " Yes. Aha. Even though Metropolis is uh much more modern film than pretty much everything else that was happening at the time, [clears throat] — I do have a couple uh just to let you guys know uh there are three questions that we have that are great questions — uh from the audience here. I want to tackle them after we finish this particular topic, but I want to make sure it's out there for this. — Awesome. All right. So, Zer, you want to continue on — for the flow of this scene? — Yeah. So yeah, it's we have right here uh typically eyes are drawn to faces like we almost always are looking at like a focal point is almost always going to be a character in most cases. So you know we're looking at Roomie and then we cut and our eye was if we kind of draw like our eyes around here on the screen. — So we're looking at that and then it cuts and our eyes here which is you know very close to where the new character is. And then you have this motion right here, which motion is the other thing that you're really going to see. So this motion of the sliding door pulls your eye in that kind of direction. And then it's kind of a uh this is like a cut to zoom in to see closer. — And then we're still looking center screen like you were talking about. And then we're also having that motion this direction which pulls our eye kind of towards this side of the screen. — It's it makes it broad. And then after the camera starts moving in the same

direction too as well. — So the camera pans over here tiger that's right down here. — What were you saying Stephen? — They when they did that movement that went to the side they broadened your expectation for where you're going to look. when they pulled you out to the side that created the space with uh them putting Roomie off to the side that broadened where you're looking and then Derpy's in the middle. So, you've already been so intentionally pushed into this next visual. — Yeah. So, then you're expecting to see, you know, there's the eyes that pop up here and then it's back to the center like you were saying for pretty much the rest of the scene. — And the cutting, the humor here. I laughed so hard the first time I saw this because you're like, "Oh, creepy deeming. " See, like this is part of the storytelling is you set up anticipation. — Like I know Stephen, you and I were we were chatting about like — you know these things that are going to happen like cinematography. You have this language of knowing when a jump scare is going to happen. You know when a fight scene's that you see an evil character. So you have you're using the expectation of an audience to say this is going to be a demon that's coming. So, like, oh, he's got to pull out her sword and there's going to be a fight sequence and then you're like, no, it's just a derpy cat. — Yeah, he's just a big old — my favorite character in the entire movie. — Yeah. [clears throat] — So, — did you want to talk about the lighting at all? — Yeah. So, like once we get down to the level of So, we have the cameras. So we go story, then we go camera and camera movement, and then we have the edit, and then we get to the lighting of each of these scenes. So you know, like why would they draw your attention? Like there are in live action films, there's two or there's like one director of photography and that person is in charge of the camera and the lighting because they actually do all at the same time. Where in animated films, we do story boards with the story reel and the director and the, you know, the storyboard artists put all of this together to plan the shots and then they have a director photography over the 3D scenes where they put physical or not physical but like virtual cameras in a three-dimensional world to mimic what was done in the storyboards. And then you wait for two years while they build all the environments and then they do animate all the characters and they're like puppets in a three-dimensional world. And once they're all done in the last year of production, that's when lighting comes in. So by then all of the cameras are locked and you start doing the actual lighting. So if we break down the lighting — before that, while you're talking about storyboards, do you want to quickly pull up our example of a storyboard? — Show that a little bit. — Yeah, I mean we — Yeah, just to show what that is. — We did this yesterday as well, but we will show you. Um, this is an example of a storyboard here that we did. We shared this in yesterday's talk as well, but like this is just a plan. This is called an animatic. It's rough sketches that are done really quickly like in an afternoon. figuring out all of the shot types and all of those stuff we've been talking about, camera motions, shot types, characters, just the key elements — so that you can make sure the story is working before committing to modeling full characters and environments and all of that because like it like you said, it takes like two years to do all of that. You don't want to mess up and then having like millions of dollars that you spend. — Yeah. So, if you can plan it all out like this — before you make the film and you're looking at the way the shots work between each other and like seeing the character, when do you choose wide shots? close-ups? Like we establish here like we start with a wide shot, then we cut in closer and you see this little character come on, you know, into the scene and then we cut even closer to get more of a reaction of like, you know, what are they doing? But because we have the establishing shots. So like this is what an animatic looks like versus planning out the actual shots and then [clears throat] you get to the point of putting in the lighting. So what's interesting between these two sequences that is that their lighting is amazingly similar even though they're half an hour different in the movie. And so when I'm looking at how do you light scenes and how do you make this well is like this is full night and this one is kind of like blue hour. the sun is already set. But for mood with this, they're both really dark scenes. I would venture to say that the reason why they're so dark is that this is a part of her life that she's keeping hidden. So you know the details of what's happening in the movie, she has a secret. So almost all the times that we see her with the demons and anything, you know, with the demon realm, it's kind of in this darker period of night. So, but it is very soft and really pretty, too. So, we don't have any harsh

sunlight. It is what we would call uh low-key lighting. Um, so it's just like very dim, you know, and dark. Not lowkey as in the the modern term of like it's low-key awesome, but like the key lights are low on the horizon, but we do get good shape and form onto the characters. Actually, I want to break down like I'm just talking about this scene. Like it's kind of nice, too, where the characters in the dark, you see the eyes at first, so it makes it mysterious, and then they walk into the light. And this light is probably brighter than everything around it. Like I look at the amount of light that's hitting the plants, and it's not that bright. But they accentuated drawing our eye to the focal point of this shot as the character moves in. So way brighter than probably what it would normally be. But that's what we do. We're breaking the rules of physics. Lighting in for cinema is not necessarily like lighting for the real world. We're not making it look believable like it's real. We're make we're drawing your eye to very particular things. — Okay. So one thing that I want to establish in the second scene. So, if we come back to this one, we have established from a lighting standpoint to go it's night and it's kind of cool, but it's also there's a coziness to this. Like, you're in a bedroom, big wealthy bedroom in this apartment that, you know, it's just soft and kind of happy here. But there are light sources, physical practical lights that we see that can be used to rim this character, to rim her face. And then there's a mystery light that's coming from above that we really can't see. But because we see a couple of the practical light sources, we buy that you can have cool lights and warm lights. So when we cut to her, there is a light that's again coming from above because I see something on screen. I go, "Yeah, that's lighting this. " Even though it doesn't actually make sense. There's no light right beside her here that we can see. But here, you just buy it. You're like, "Yeah, there's a light that's just offscreen. There's no light source there. " If you have ever seen a sound stage for like um sitcoms or whatever where they have like the roof is removed and it's just like two walls uh and they have all the cameras and stuff and there's like a bunch of lights coming in from the roof. It's kind of like that in some ways [clears throat] animated where yeah there's a light mysteriously coming in. It's also for like nighttime scenes. There's often like so that you can see the character's expressions, there'll be like a uh light for like the moon, even though moonlight is actually very dim realistically, — like random mystery light coming in from the above big spotlight. — There's so much to talk about when it comes to breaking down the cinematography and the lighting of it, too. That's really interesting. But like, as long as we see we saw blue moonlight and we saw warm lights, now you can put lights wherever you want to shape this. So warm on one side, cool on the other. There's enough key fill ratio. And then there's a rim light. So this is kind of like classic threepoint lighting. Key is the worm light from, you know, screen left. The rim light is the back, you know, and then there's a fill light here. Key, rim, fill. That's three-point lighting. What's really kind of cool though is when we cut to these shots where you have both characters because we've just established a few of those sources, you can have all of these mystery lights like where's that light that's pointing down? We don't know, but you don't care. It's just kind of like, you know, like you don't have to worry about the rules quite so much anymore. It's amazing how often this the position of these lights will change when you're really studying film scenes and you like there's whole scenes where there's backlight in every single shot. Like I worked on, you know, let me come back here and just talk for a minute about I worked on the TV show Westworld and I was on season four. So I was absorbing my mind around seasons one, two, and three really quickly to get up to speed to get ready for it. And I learned something that was really fun that in season one, which I loved. I thought it was great. Um, there's this whole sequence that every single shot is back lit. And what they did was on set, because they were outside with real sun, is that they shot in the morning all the shots looking that direction. — Then they waited all day long until the sun moved through the sky to shoot the reverse angle shots the other direction. So, it's like 7 a. m. and 700 p. m. that they're shooting the entire scene. because the light is it looks similar between the two. It just flows in the edit and you have no clue that is what's happened. And I asked the the guy who was, you know, guiding it, Jonathan Nolan, you know, about the whole thing and he's like, I always shoot backlight. We're definitely going to do every single shot backlit. We had to then plan for the way we were going to do our sequences to always be back lit in the same way. And I find that stuff so fascinating. It's so cool. Yeah, — absolutely. Uh would you guys be okay with taking a couple of the questions? — Yeah, let's do it. — Okay. All right. So, I've got some that

range in different um different levels of intensity. Uh some of them definitely less intense than the others. Uh first and foremost, real quick guys, we we're brought here by the course that these two fine gentlemen have put together. You can find that over at proco. comcinematic. Uh you can also find them over on lighting mentor on YouTube. Uh that's right here or online at lightingmentor on all the platforms that matter. But [clears throat] let's dig into these questions. — Yeah. — All right. So, uh Timokisan had said, "I love to hear their thoughts. Sometimes it's hard for me to write a scene. So, I start by drawing what I'm imagining and then build the story and mood from that. Do you think that's a good approach? " — Yeah. I mean, I think if that works for you, I mean, I don't think there's like a one path. There's so many different ways that you can approach things. So, if that is what works for you, then that sounds great. — I would actually say absolutely because if you can use words and visuals, then it means you're really thinking about it even more. Like I always encourage people like if you came into my mentorship program right now and I'm helping people get you know into the field and I don't care where your skill level is at the very first thing that I'm going to tell you is imagination matters more than anything right now and story matters more. So even if you need to work on basic drawing skills I'm still going to say I want you to come up with 15 story moments where you can make a scene where you're building an illustration that tells a unique story. So instead of making pretty art of pictures of fruit, you know, or whatever, we're going to build something that has a story moment in it. So if just the practice of going, where is the camera, what is the environment, what is the character, where are the characters, how are they dressed, how are they posed, you're going to do every single piece of the art pipeline or the illustration pipeline. I don't even want to use art anymore because there's too much, you know, in this. I'm a visual storyteller. So the visual storytelling pipeline, you know, for movies and games is about, you know, what is on screen. So if you're slowing down to think about that when you're writing, fantastic. That's awesome. Because then you'll visualize the scene, maybe draw some maps, maybe draw how it's going to, you know, if you get up and physically move around. Where was it? We were talking about I don't remember if Stephen if it was a conversation with you. Um, who was it that was working on uh books and they would I guess it might not have been I think it was like Ernest Hemingway or something that would actually have a mirror in their house and as they're writing the book they would go and they would stand up and they would play out the characters. Oh no, it wasn't Ernest Hemingway. It was um who wrote Christmas Carol. Charles Dickens. — Yeah. — Was known to do this and like that was 150 years. That's pretty cool to like plan out how does is this a natural scene? So yeah, I would go for it. — Yeah. I mean, and also I think with writing, the reason why I think writing is often like a starting place for stories that are eventually going to become film is that film is really expensive to set up and drawing can take a long time to like figure out different stuff. So writing is nice for just like it's really fast. You just this thing happens, that thing happens. Words are really fast to work with. But a common problem is that words and to film don't translate particularly well. So keeping it very visual is really important to make sure that you're actually communicating what you want because there's certain concepts like very abstract mental concepts are extremely hard to show in film. — Yeah. like this character is thinking about this concept and the actual shot in the movie is like and that doesn't tell you anything like if someone's saying like uh the one that I like is using an example is — they see a color they've never seen before — on film you physically cannot make a new color it's not physically possible so how do you show that on screen — um — you can put that in a novel — yeah but you can't show that on screen so there's like you could try and work around it where a character where you never actually see it on screen and the character's just like that's a really cool color or whatever or maybe you show some weird rainbowy thing. It's just like visual effects and it's like but that's not actually a new color. We have rainbows. Rainbows exist. — Yeah. — So there's certain concepts that don't translate well. So getting it visual as early as possible. That's why storyboards are so important is really good to make sure that you don't have any of those problems or conflicts so that you're actually telling the story that will work in the final medium. Screenwriting is interesting and like you studied screenwriting particularly at New York Film Academy, you know. So like that is a craft. It is its own skill. I think that everyone should experiment with that, you know, just kind of like I think all people who are doing illustration should do a little bit of acting even if they're like I suck at it and I don't ever want to do that again. Just doing a little bit of it is just good for the soul. Just like screenwriting and understanding what is the difference between a novel, a short story, a screenplay, a stage play, you know, like all of those things are just good for you as an artist to even

just to have empathy on other people in your department if you're working on a real film, you know, and some writer writes something like I want the writers to also have some practical experience and to, you know, do some focus pulling so that they'll have a little bit of grace like why didn't you get the focus perfect when this person was moving through the scene with a crazy shallow depth of field and like do you know how hard that is? — Yeah. — And different skills reinforce each other. So having more variety of skills is always useful. — Without a doubt. — Y. — All right. Uh there's one question that I know what the answer is going to be for it. Um this is I'm going to put this one in for later. Uh because it'll be a quick answer or a very long answer, — but both would be serviceable answers to it. — Um — so let's see here. Uh, Tamoki had another one asking, uh, another question I have. Since attention spans are getting shorter with social media, how can we structure visuals or storytelling to keep the audience engaged? We've talked about this a little bit. There are many different techniques for it, but um, do you guys want to kind of like go over some of the things we've already talked about or some favorite techniques? I mean, an initial one that stands out to me, this is I mean, just kind of off of that as a prompt, maybe not super specifically tied to that, is just mystery is a really good way of engaging people of always having some question that the audience wants answered and — and then you answer one question and then you kind of introduce new questions so that there's never there's always like a I need to know this thing feeling and that will keep them engaged uh so that you can set up the things that you want to. — Yeah. I mean, have you ever watched a short film and you're like, "Oh, this feels like it's going forever. " And then you look and like it's been five minutes. And then you can watch another movie and you're just like, "How did three hours just go by like that? " Like that is the craft of making you need to know the answer. Like there are — there are certain shows that are so good at this in the first 30 seconds you're like, I'm hooked, you know? So, it is about anticipation. It is about storytelling. It is about drawing in interest and making it where like I'm going to offer you something in a minute. It's going to be the meaning of life. Of course, you're going to be like, "Oh, what is this? " I mean, that's this is kind of the danger zone of what um you know, people use for advertising. They're like, "Wouldn't you like to be healthy and fit and have all the energy in the world? " Well, I have the secret thing. If you just buy my course and do this thing and purchase the thing, which feels very hypocritical when we're selling a course here, but — still. I mean, it's the same thing of going you want to engage people. Now, if you lie about it, you know, that's where um you know, when we look at uh clickbait, if you actually give what they want, then they'll be engaged and they'll continue into the next scene. If you don't give them what they want, they're going to get really angry. upset to be like, "You offered me all of this amazing stuff in life. " Like, I've purchased stuff off of Instagram and regretted it later to go, "This is this is terrible. " you like I wouldn't buy that ever again you know because they misadvertised it so in a story I think understanding that as a component is key too like what are you offering do you set up and pay off is one of the key things of good storytelling — and that's the kind of element uh for you know taking that less from advertising more into storytelling like if you had how is this character going to get out of this terrible situation ah how do we escape and then the reward is the creative solution to the problem the characters are facing facing. They cross a bridge, the bridge is broken, how are they going to get across? Like that kind of question. And or how are they going to survive? How — defeat the bad guys or whatever it is they're dealing with? — Do you want to talk about the uh the D&D movie real quick? Because this is fun around this topic. — Sure. [clears throat] — For sure. Yeah. So, this I mean it kind of ties in with it. This one's a little bit different for this example, but they have this um really cool ability uh that the characters have and they use it in a lot of creative ways. This is kind of more that payoff of like how to make it engaging to get the solution to problems rather than just like if you have a story with no conflict and the characters just always win everything, that's not interesting because there's no question there. It's like, oh well, the characters are going to win because they're overpowered and they always win. — Yeah. So, it's fun to limit their abilities. You don't want to have your characters be too powerful. And this is a good example of one thing that movies use a lot is as an obstacle is some kind of physical like I need to get to this location um and how do they get there? So, teleporting is usually a thing that's pretty bad to do like let your characters use for free um because it skips all over obstacles. Yeah, they're overpowered and then you can't use those obstacles narratively. So, this has uh in this movie they have this bridge collapses um that they're trying to get across and there's this big lava pit, but they figure out that one of this staff they

had uh is actually magical and can create portals. If you've ever played the game Portal, uh this is exactly like that. So, it connects these two portals up and you can walk through it so they can go to the other side and they establish that which is quite powerful. you know, you can teleport to other places. Um, but they do a good job of limiting its power. So, later after they escape, they're being chased by this dragon and they're in this confined little room that's being flooded and they have no way out. And one of the characters is like, "Just get us out of here with the portal thing. " But the character says, "No, I can't. Do you want to go from this wall to that wall? I need a clear line of sight. " Like, it kind of shoots out a portal thing. — So, you have to actually be able to see what you want to make the portal on. And that kind of limits the power in a very efficient, very clear way. So they're kind of throughout the movie, they're creating obstacles for characters to teach the audience how this ability works. — Setup, payoff. — Yeah. — Limitations. — So it's not just a scene that's about ah it's drama, but it's actually giving you information, the audience information about how this works so that they can then set up later in the movie they're uh as a like establishing thing. They're trying to break in. It's like a heist. into this vault and they're — seen the whole freaking movie, man. It's so good. It's so fun. — It's an underrated movie, I think. — So, they're trying to get into this like there's a caravan and they're trying to like the caravan's going to put treasure into the vault and they're going to try and sneak uh the portal into this caravan. Um, and so they kind of sneak on board. They have a druid character that can shapeshift into little fly. So, they're bringing this uh portal inside. And the concept that I want to talk about here and why I picked out this scene is the idea of failing forwards in that failure is a powerful tool to make um like more intense drama. Uh and not thinking of failure as you're trying to do this thing, you fail and it doesn't happen and this plot just ends. But like how does failure kind of tripping forwards into the next scene where it's like uh oh things are worse now but you're still making progress within the story. — So you set up an expectation. They think this is going to be great. That's our solution to how we get into the castle is through this weird portal hidden in a picture frame. — But then uh oh their little glue thing breaks and now the portal falls down and they're being dragged behind this cart and it's this crazy fun scene. And so that failure kind of makes things more exciting, more intense. Uh oh, things are worse now. Uh the way that I like to think about it is if there's failure in a scene, like the characters fail to accomplish something, it should punish maybe the characters, but never the audience. The audience should be punished by the characters failing. — Um like, oh, the story just ends, that's it. You know, failure should make things more exciting for the audience. It pushes the story forwards. or if there's something that needs to happen, that's where you have like plot armor type stuff of like the thing needs to happen for this cool moment. So, just make it happen even if it's unlikely. Um, so this is a fun way of using this portal where they're kind of being dragged behind and trying to pull them back into the cart and it's just a fun interesting interpretation with adding motion into [clears throat] this portal. — Um, and then one other example of the setup and payoff. So, they finally managed to deal with that, get him back. um out of that situation and then they put the painting on and they get it uh into the vault. But the problem is the painting falls face down and so they their whole plan with this portal basically gets ruined by uh oh it's just facing towards the ground. How do we go through the portal? So it forces them to adapt their strategy and kind of brings them into more conflict with the antagonist. They wanted this easy solution and it forces the characters to be more creative and kind of progressing the plot forwards — and all of this is those things that we should be studying as artists of going like the movie was engaging. So like one of the answers to the question if we come back to that question is how do you keep audiences engaged to me is like well look at the things that engage you and then study it. Learn to break it down like this. Like, how did it keep my attention? If I loved that video, movie, why did it keep my attention? Or even better, if something doesn't keep your attention, then it's good to go like when no, I really want to study this one. Where did they fail? Where did they lose my interest? And then why? Because if you can learn about storytelling and about editing and about cameras and about pacing and setups and payoffs, then you will learn the skills of being able to make it engaging. And this is something that very few people have the ability to do. Like this is Have you seen how many bad movies there are out there? You know

— too many — way too many people with money that finance terrible ideas from an executive that has a business degree that has no right telling stories — versus real true storytellers that make amazing movies that are engaging. — I know there's this one question, but this really ties in perfectly with what you're saying of how to keep things engaging. If you can pull up the um — Knives Out — uh yeah, Knives Out scene. M [clears throat] the uh a concept that I really like is called narrative consolidation which is basically just how to be more concise and this is a good example of that of being really concise. Um I think often uh beginners getting into it kind of feel the need to just show everything that happens like this character goes to this location and does this thing and you just show every single moment. But part of making it is choosing — only show the things that have purpose that drive the plot forwards that are interesting — and then finding creative ways to show less of everything else that's more mundane and boring like uh when it comes to travel like in the real world you have to travel every single step of every single journey if you want to get somewhere but in a movie is this moving the plot forward or you can just kind of like time jumps you can be like we don't need to see this we've already seen it before the character's going from point A to point B you don't need to show every single step. How do you only show the ones that are interesting? So, uh this is like a murder mystery movie called Knives Out. And basically towards the end of the movie, um there's this detective character right here. And um he's kind of like, "Tell me your whole story to the main character. " Um you know, finally figured everything like they're kind of like getting to the end, resolving it. Um, and he's like, "Tell me the whole your whole story. We just saw the story un unfold throughout the movie. " And instead of having um them just show them driving and then character resaying everything you just saw happen throughout the movie, uh, he basically says, "Tell me your whole story on the ride over. " And then we see a single shot of a car driving past. You don't hear anyone talking, just the music picks up. And then we transition to the next location where they're going to this house. So this is an establishing shot for the next scene. Um, and we're barely showing anything of the car drive. — So really fast transition. And then here the car pulls up and we're hearing the like the last couple of words of the story. It's like — and then this thing happened and then it ends the sentence. So that's a nice way of like you're implying implication is really powerful. what are you implying to the audience so that you can do a time jump and basically say like oh they just had a full conversation you don't need to hear the conversation we just saw it happen um so that can be a powerful tool for just imply what's going to happen give just enough information to say this thing happened — here — um and then they do it again immediately after uh the detective is like okay thanks for telling me the story are you ready to go in and face the family um you know of the victim and kind of interact with them. And instead of showing like a shot of opening the car door, getting out of the car, walking up to the front of the house, opening house door, uh she just kind of looks up at the building. And then we cut straight to a shot of walking into the house right into the next scene. So, it's really about how do you compress shots into you're only showing things that are relevant to the story. And that might have been the moment that would have killed somebody's interest in the movie if you just went literal with this. I guess we can cut back to just us chatting now. Um, — so if you had shown everything like scientifically, they got out of the car, they walked up to the door, they put away their keys, they opened the door. None of that's necessary. And that is your moment of going, you might disengage from someone because you're just showing too much. You're being too realistic. you're being too literal to the real world. You like we had a similar example like almost everyone when they're making their very first short film starts with well I'm going to have a story of a character waking up and so I'm going to show an alarm clock and then them brushing their teeth and putting on their shirt and they're getting the breakfast and the toast and the orange juice and cracking an egg and then they're grabbing their bag and they're going out the door and they're they realize, oh no, I'm late for work. So they do a quick shower and they do all this and so you spend all day shooting all of these things — where all you needed to do is show the alarm clock and them going, "Oh man. " And then you show them jumping in the car putting on the last — maybe they grab their bag on the way out that informs all of the other stuff — you imply what's happening. — And then also, you know, how do you maybe merge things together? Like in that example, maybe can you show all of that at once? like they're sipping coffee as they're putting on their jacket and opening the car door like all in one motion — instead of showing it like here's one thing, here's the next thing, here's the

next thing. Merging things together. — We actually just saw this. We're watching a show Hijack on Apple TV and there's this character who's running late and it's part of who she is. And so they don't show anything in the house. They just show her coming out. She's on the phone with her boss and she's telling her kid, "Get in the car. " boss like, "He had his appendix out yesterday. " And then the kids's like, "You already told that lie. " You know, like that's really funny. And they didn't have to show any of the stuff in the house. It's just — she's talking on the phone on the way to the car. And like, okay, it's the very first character, too. So, they've established who she is, who her personality is. She's has a kid and like you can do all of this stuff in one single shot. And that's the skill to learn. Like this is — if you learn this skill, it's an entire career. — Yeah. like it is such a rich subject but it doesn't have to be complicated. It can start with simple films. — Yeah. Uh I do have some other questions for you guys if you want those. — Great. — Yeah. — Okay. So Chanto uh had a couple different questions here in the chat. He said, "One thing that I've definitely learned from all of this is how artificial it all is. When I first started uh I was first starting to learn about lighting, uh the recommended the recommendation is always to use references. So, I'd look at regular photos. — And then I think this pairs with another one. — I might have lost one of the images here or one of the questions here. Um someone had said uh they were asking basically like how can you study from film if in film they are consistently doing these different changes where like you were talking about where everything is back lit it's physically impossible but so like do you think that it's still useful to look at films to be able to uh study from those? — Absolutely. I mean, so I'm going to give a resource here. Shot deck. com. — That's the one I was looking for earlier. — It's so good, you know. So, Shot Deck was made by a director of photography who said, you know, every time I go to shoot a new film, I kind of want to look at I want the feeling of that film or the feeling of this film, and you're putting together an art deck of images, a deck. That's why they call it shot deck. And so, this guy started going, "Can I have permission to scan frames from your movie? " And how many are on there now? There's something like four million images from — Yeah. — And so if you want reference to really study films, you can go there and you can make an account. And I think it's worth it. It's like $10 a month. And I use it all the time to look for images to study. Again, not studying the real world, but studying a cinematic version of the world. And then if I find things that I'm like, man, that movie is really pretty. Then I will go watch the actual movie and I will stop and go, okay, let's analyze the shots. Let's look at the lens types, the shot types, and the lighting because you can like there's a scene in Lord of the Rings where Froto and the Hobbits are running from Yeah, there's Shot Deck. Shot Deck's amazing. It's so good. I mean, it's a really amazing website and you can download these files. You can use them. They'll tell you about the actors and the directors. And if they have the information, they'll tell you about the shot type. And you can search by time of day or by, you know, like I want a medium shot, uh, exterior. It it's really cool. — Super great tool for those of us in the film industry. Lighting artists use this all the time to find reference. Like I want something like that for my game. So you don't have to generate everything and you can learn from it. Mhm. — But the more you learn about these subjects, the more you can like break it down and start studying for yourself and like that's fascinating. Look at what they did with this light. Look that light. So Lord of the Rings, there's a scene where no matter what, it's always backlit. So no matter where they move, they're moving through this entire scene. And I talk about it in some of my courses, too. And in your course, you break down all kinds of different movies and scenes, too. And like — they're always flowing from left to right through like three sequences. and the moonlight is always moving with them no matter what because it looks consistent between every single shot and it's fascinating. I mean, with being artificial, I think it's partly it's more about what you feel by seeing it and less about the technical details of what you're actually seeing because you're looking at a shot. In most movies, shots are like, you know, three to six seconds long, if even that. They're really short sometimes. And it's just about what do you quickly gather in that short flash of time. And sometimes it's more important to we want this mood or this tone and this backlit look looks better. Uh, and it's more about that feeling than it is about the technical accuracy of the position of the sun in the sky. — Yeah. I mean, part of the reason that I made this course in these two courses, like I started making mine and then Cedar was like, I I'm interested in talking in being a part of this because we shot some short films with this. We

hired actors, we rented locations, we flew people up from LA, we had expensive cameras, we had all kinds of stuff that we did for this. and we're showing everything in the course. — And part of the reason is that there's a lot of people that could benefit from this. Like I get excited about cinematography in particular, visual storytelling. So if you're a concept artist, you should learn this information. If you're a if you want to be a comic artist, you should learn this information. You may never become a cinematographer. photographer, you know, even still photography, but you still should learn this information so you can apply it to your painting. So, I made this course not as a how to become a cinematographer, but like this is cinematography for artists. — Mhm. — Specifically, that's why it works so well on Proco. And it seems kind of odd, you know, like you're looking at like drawing course, painting course, [clears throat] — cinematography. Why would I want that? I'm like, trust me, it's — You do. — You really do. It's so vital to the way, you know, all of this, you know, should work. Oh, yeah. There's the short film. There's a bunch of stuff in here. I suppose we could use this. I mean, we could we can answer another question, but then we can show — Yeah. — No, I think you should show some of the stuff. Yeah, I think this is as good of a spot with the segue for that as anything. — Raw footage for the thing. — Okay. So, — so one of the things that we're offering in the course is we actually shot a short film um like it's we did it like a scene from a movie. So, we hired actors and we got the lighting and we went through and made it at a really high level cuz a lot of like this equipment and stuff is really expensive and not everyone would have access to uh fancy lighting equipment because it gets very expensive, fancy cameras and things like that, but we wanted to be accessible so that you can learn about this stuff wherever you're at. Um so even um you know if even if you don't have access to those things, hopefully you can still learn from this course. So, what we did is we've provided all of the raw footage for this scene. So, you can actually edit it together and kind of experiment with like we were talking about like shot flow of like when do you put those cuts? How do you do that? So, this is a short little scene of these two characters breaking in to this little cabin to try and steal some blackmail that they have on them and trying to sort through some papers. So, it's a little dramatic scene like it's from a movie. Uh, and we have 40 minutes of raw footage. — Yeah. — That's available to edit. um that's at that high level so you can get an experience with flow and pacing and scenes even if you can't shoot it yourself. I mean I definitely encourage if you can if you take the course definitely encouraged to try and shoot films yourself but it's very difficult. Uh, you know, hopefully this resource will be really helpful for learning, — hiring actors, renting locations, having the camera, having the lighting gear. Like the light that's here is a cinema light so it won't flicker on camera. Like we did a bunch of stuff to make this as professional as possible. Low-end professional. Like we're not showing like I remember being on set for like the Fallout TV show and we had $60 million worth of lights. you like we had these $12,000 REI sky panels and we had 197 of them. This is not the level of cinematography we're talking about. We're talking about okay, you have lower like the amount of lights that I have is, you know, a few thousand dollars worth of lights, but we're going to show you in the course how to do this with just available cheap lights and then we want you to get that experience. That's where like in the end this little sequence is only what two minutes long. Not even — edit that I put together. Yeah. — But we want you to get that experience. So like how we shot this, we break down how we make it. So for each of these scenes, we start with an establishing wide shot. So if I come back here, so like this is a wider shot with like a I think this is a 24 millimeter lens for this shot. So we're showing the characters coming up to the door and we are considering eye flow through the whole thing. So we were thinking about while we're shooting it, we're thinking about the edit. — Yeah. So you wrote the script, we shot it together, he edited it, and we want you to get that same experience of like, okay, so we shot the entire scene wide and then we have multiple takes and then we shoot it with a zoomed in lens. So this is like into a 50 millimeter lens and then we come into like a 70 millimeter lens. I think we use only like four lenses. Yeah. — For the whole thing. So we have close-ups, we have different shot types. So we have wides, mediums, close-ups, extreme close-ups through the whole thing. And then we show the characters breaking into the house. We talk about the process of like brought a smoke machine and we set off all the fire alarms in the entire house and we banned it down and we just had flashlights and like how do we, you know, see the scene where we make it spooky like these two characters are going into house. How do we keep the colors really simple and how do we use bounce light? You know, like the scene is really simple here. like when the characters come into the scene, we couldn't really see them and

we wanted that feeling of like it's dark, dark. So then I told the character like when you shine the flashlight like you're looking into the room, don't shine it into the room, shine it onto the door frame so we get that bounce light that'll light onto your face and we'll use that as a soft bounce key onto your face. And those are the type things that you do in a little bit more advanced film making. It's not even that [clears throat] advanced. It's still pretty basic, but like we talk about the whole thing to have this moody look and all of these lights are customcrafted. You know, there are cinema lights in the other room and that one's blue and this one's cool and neutral and you know, like when the characters finally come in and they find, you know, these paperwork. We just had a blue light in the scene that was bouncing off the ceiling to give fill light. It was rented cabin in the middle of the forest and it was like super [snorts] dark there. There was no natural light. And then we have the warm light on the table that's bouncing off the table onto their faces. They come and they turn on the light. So again, we're offering all of this footage to play with. — Yeah. How would you edit it? How would you do the music? Like I guess we could show the uh you know, if we wanted, we could show the actual short um for — This is up to you guys. Yeah. If you'd like to. — I don't see why not. I feel like saving that for the course because at least in my mind I wouldn't want to influence with the decisions I made in the edit when I was putting that — to like get that like early because like I think part of that experience is learning for yourself to be able to make those choices and if you saw how I used the footage maybe be too influenced and you wouldn't learn as much. — So I guess my perspective I think the learning potential is better if you were interacting with it first. No, this makes sense to me. We can give them other educational content by you guys answering some more questions. — Yeah, let's do it. — Okay. All right. So, we've got a couple here. Um, this was [snorts] I didn't There's one of these that I didn't get to read, so I'm going to read it while you guys answer the other one. — Yeah. — All right. Uh so John Doe in the chat had said uh given that they are the artists setting all of this up and that they need to know how about the technical details did they have to retrain themselves to understand how audience see it did you have to uh unlearn things and look at them as a beginner would for making this course. — Yeah. It's always hard for like figuring out like how do you um say the right things and not be like ah here's a ton of vocabulary jargon and it's not actually understandable like how do you slow down and go like — very simple that's where the first assignment in the cinematic storytelling is really just like assuming even if you do have some experience with some of these concepts like I just assume you know nothing about cameras or anything — and just like here's this word here's what this thing means and like slowly build that and then it kind of steeps it gets like a steep learning curve into the future stuff where it's like okay add another character add more advanced camera stuff and it starts getting a lot more complicated but having that ramp to slowly get into it — I mean if you look at even like my YouTube channel and you can see if you like my teaching style I my philosophy of teaching style and I think Cedar has the same thing is you want to be able to have something that you can practically use to see growth in your artwork you know like there's a lot of teachers that actually aren't really good teachers. They're just really skilled at their craft and then they're demonstrating their craft in a way that just makes things more confusing and frustrating. For me, my whole goal is I try to judge it and say, "How can I give you something that you can go this changed the way that I see it and do my art and it's so awesome and I can practically see the change now. " So, I try to rewind to go like, "How do we, you know, like when I started with my painting courses, it's like, okay, we're going to do we're not going to teach you everything about Photoshop, you know, first. We're going to be like one layer, one brush, no undo, go, you know, and that's it. And we're going to just make sure that this is accessible or on an iPad Procreate. Really, really really simple and go. We're going to make it like you're a traditional person. — Don't pay attention now to anything else. And then progressively make it more complicated. So like the beginning of the photography course, I'm like, we're just using your phone and we're talking about shot types. Get the shot types down. Then we're going to do a little bit of lensing and like in still just using a simple phone and then working your way until you're at the end of the course, you know, this course between his and mine, it's over 18 hours long. It's a lot of information and just a huge amount of stuff in there, but I know it's going to be fun. I've had other people, you know, say like I'm going to say my friend Julia, I gave her access early and she's like this completely changed the way like she's like I've taken three different cinematography or photography courses in the past and none of them were made for artists. — And so that was my goal was to try to make this, — you know, where it really will be applicable to people that would be coming to Proco or people that come to learning about painting. — That's you guys watching this right now.

You can get this course for 20% off. 25% off right now over at broker. com/scinematic. You should check it out. They're the two halves to it that we've been talking about here and there throughout this whole thing. Um, like you said, they build on each other. They complement the skills that you've already probably learned as an artist or will inform the skills that you will learn as an artist if you if you're deciding to take this on maybe a little bit earlier in your art learning career. That's not a terrible thing to do. Sometimes you can get ahead of yourself and that's okay because buying a course on Proco is lifetime membership or lifetime ownership. So you can come back to it whenever. Um but no, so let's see. We have a couple other questions here. This is going to be one that um all of us here in like on this screen right now might have different answers for this because of how — we tell stories and the — the different uh things that we think of first as what is most important for telling a story visually. So I'm very curious to hear the answer. All right. So this was from the innovative overview. They said that stories I have are in a world where designs uh advertisements, promos, products, etc. in the environment wait in — designs in the environment — where I have are in a world where designs in the environment often Oh, they lost they left a word here. How do I manage to not let background designs not uh affect the main story? Oh, they dropped a word out there. I was really excited at the idea and I didn't read it super intensely. Um, but I think the thing that they're asking for is that the last part of it. How do I manage to not let background designs um overtake the main story is what I'm going to choose to take from this. uh because they what they're saying is they have like a really busy world and that's what I'm interpreting this as advertisements, promos, products, etc. are right there up front. How do they have that not overtake the main story? — Aperture. — How do you design something that is busy? You said what? — Aperture. Blur out the background, shallow depth of field. The impression of the world. Use your camera to your advantage to say maybe an establishing shot, you should show the busyiness of it. And then when you cut in close, just choose your lensing in such a way that you're focused on the character, what they're seeing, and then only make one thing be in focus. Or use light and color to do this, too. To go pools of light and pools of dark will draw your eye. [clears throat] That's one of the crafts of cinematography as well. What do you say? — I mean, I would agree that first thing for if it's for individual shots. Yeah, definitely. um aperture as well if you're not as familiar with it. It's like what's in focus versus what's not in focus. So it affects um you know whether it's like really tight and very shallow. So that's where like this one thing is in focus and everything's super blurry versus having everything's in focus. So yeah, being able to like focus in on just like you're looking at this character, that's the only thing you can see, everything else is blurry. — I'm going to be a nerd right now because we are shooting our This is not a web camera. This is my $7,000 camera that's up here. I have my aperture set to 5. 6, which means we're both in focus. Well, you see this in a lot of the background. Look at how much the background is in focus. And my ISO is set to 2500. So, there's a little bit of grain in this because I have manual focus with the camera. What I like to do is, and I can just reach over here and I can — drop that bad boy down to — 1. 4. — This is 2. 8. And you'll notice when I do that now, it gets too bright. So, I'm going to take my ISO and bring that down to 500. Can you see how what it did to the background? — But I'm in focus and Cedar's out of focus. So, I have to make sure that I sit on the same plane as him, but the background's significantly blurriier now just with changing a couple of the camera settings. And I do that intentionally. And I gotten so good, like it sounds like a complicated thing, but I have my settings where these three fingers can control everything on the camera. And he's gotten used to that. Like we can go out, you know, and we can go, okay, I'm ready to go just like that. And we choosing where the buttons are and we are intentionally choosing how blurry the background is. Like this background blur is not, you know, a Zoom call type thing. That's all in the camera, — if that makes sense. — No, it makes perfect sense. Yeah. I don't know for the people out there like chances are at some point in time you've clocked something in a film where something was out of focus or there's different qualities to the background versus the foreground. — Uh maybe it's like it's a swirly kind of background or something and these are character uh characteristics that are introduced by the lens typically. — Uh there there's some other ways you can do it with filters and things but it's typically the lens where this happens. to add to [clears throat] that as well. Like you could do like lighting things I think you mentioned where you like darken things you don't want to see and only put lights on the important elements — or also like fog you know add extra

atmosphere so that the contrast is stronger on the foreground. Mhm. — Roger Deakons, one of the most famous cinematographers out there, Bladeunner 2049, — that movie in particular, you know, 1917, there's a whole bunch of different films that he's done that are epic cinematic, but what he does is he uses lighting almost in a graphic design way to go like there's object ccentric compositions and then there's lighting centric compositions where like the light dominates. So like backlight and fog and all of a sudden you can't see anything from the world. You're just like this gradient of beautiful fog and the whole shot's orange and the next one's all green and it's really really easy to look at even though there's this giant crazy sci-fi world with robots everywhere and all this kind of craziness that is part of his style and I love that look. So like that would be easy to do too to go there's advertisements everywhere but we're just going to obscure them with lighting centric you know uh cinematography rather than white light you know like the way um sitcoms are done are lit very evenly so that they don't have to change anything between shots and they can make it like it's a stage with just hundreds of lights in the ceiling so that everything's flat and you see everybody's faces every single thing is seen but they're not as cinematic but it's made you like there's different choices for why you would do each of those things and it's not right or wrong. It's a [clears throat] different purpose. — Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. There there's the rules that you leverage at any given moment, — right? — Um for me, I don't know if I'm a person who should put anything in here. — Yeah. It's not my course, but um — Yeah. But you nerd out with us about this stuff. You spend your time doing it. So, give your answer. — Yeah. Uh, for me, the things that I would lean into um personally, whether this is a comic or if it's um or if it's something that's moving like a photo or a video or anything, uh this is an extension of what you guys were already saying. It's contrast. Uh I think the most immediate thing that you can give something is contrast. the one of the things that you guys all said here actually are extensions of that same the same concept. So where the background is hazy um that's actually it's lower contrast that that's what's happening when something is really far away the mountains in the distance are getting grayed out because of atmosphere between you and them. Uh there are other things that you can do that with. So me I'm a terrible example of this right now. things that are behind me. I mean, I I'm colorful. I'm saturated where the majority of the things behind me aren't saturated, but I actually have a lot of like busy lines on me that segment my body in ways that uh are similar to the size of some of the segment sections behind me. But let's say uh even if you're looking at this thing on what I've got right here, right? If I put all this complex text on the screen, this thing not having anything going on within it already breaks it up — from everything else behind it. Um, even though that's white on white in some areas, if the whole background is super busy and then something isn't, then that separates it. So, you can do that in a few different ways. You can also have something um happen through movement. Let's say the background is incredibly complex. Everything behind them the whole freaking time is just like giant wall. Yeah. See their faces stick out. [clears throat] You just pop — all the extra lights. — You could you can do it with movement. So let's say the character is centered in the frame the entire time. The camera is moving with them and they are static in that the middle of that frame while everything else is moving. Even if they're freaking running just full tilt the whole time, they're locked into the middle of that. Everything else that's behind them can be the most complex visual possible, but they are staying in the middle of that. And they have something that's less complex for their clothing. [snorts] You don't have to try to parse anything. Remember, contrast is not like the contrast slider inside of Photoshop. [clears throat] This is not like black and white contrast. Contrast can also be hue to go like a warm face on a blue background. Like the whole background is blue and the contrast will be just that color or the contrast can be shape language too. Like everything's square round. So like that is a form of contrast that is also very intentionally done. Boy, I really changed the look of our background here. Like I have because I'm a nerd and I have all my cinema lights, I can turn each of those things on and off and give a completely different look to the scene to intentionally draw. Like I have rim lights, I have back lights, I have glow lights behind me. You know, two of us on screen is a little bit different. I usually take this light here. Let me just turn that one back on. And so like if I have this little lamp behind

Cedar and then I have a tube light here. I normally set for my YouTube channel like this. So I have this kind of like, — you know, oh halo behind my head type of effect. That's very intentional, you know, and I could take that and be like, let's tone it way down here or turn it completely off. I'm just controlling it through the way cinematographers do because we're — absolutely. Uh, so I think that's that question. So I think I hope that we answered that question for the might not be here at this point. — If we just p anybody's curiosity into the whole world of cinema and makes you go that sounds fun, that's really cool. That's all I care about. Even if you don't buy my course, I don't care. I just want you to be curious and to study cinema and like take this lesson and learn to study cinema. Great. We need more storytellers out there. — Perfect. — Absolutely. All right. Uh we have one more question from a person who's asked plenty of good questions here so far. This is uh TKIS asking, "Quick question. Do you guys think about the audience when planning lighting and composition? Like would a kids movie have different visual settings than an adult film? — Absolutely. — And sometimes not though. — Like look at um sometimes it's fun to have a juxiposition of playful characters in realistic lighting like Pixar's movie Soul. — The human world is you know very realistic lighting even though the characters are highly stylized. And then the the universe of, you know, the great beyond the dead is very, you know, a whole different kind of style to have a contrast between the two. So like I think it's really fun, you know, sometimes also to have a serious dark movie have very playful colorful lighting. John Wick is a very serious film and it is super crazy colorful. There's like orange and red and, you know, all green lights and purple lights and all kinds of crazy lights on it. But yes, we I mean this is a whole subject of color keys and color scripting and I talk about that in my other courses, my painting light 103 course. I really talk about how to do color scripting because I've been a lighting director. I've worked on different films for like Netflix where I was in charge of the lighting of the entire film. And I'm planning this years before the movie comes out and going what is the flow between all of the sequences so that we can have a dance of light. Like when you're going to listen to music, you don't want like you think of just like bad techno music. And I always use this as an example. It's just like it's just the same and it's like, "Okay, I'm bored. " What I want — house music. — I want a buildup where you have an anticipation of like you can feel it's coming. It's building. And then when the bass drops, it makes a difference, you know, like and this is not just about electronic music. This is about classical music. It's about, you know, every other pop music does the exact same thing. We want to dance, you know. So, in storytelling also with lighting, we want to have like you're playing Uncharted 4 and you have this huge sequence where there's these giant battles and crazy things and planes are exploding and you're falling out. In the next sequence, you're exploring an attic and trying to find a prop. And it gives you a moment to breathe and to build that anticipation again because you just can't keep the intensity the entire time. So we do the exact same thing with lighting where we're like I want there to be a change in mood so that when we go from this dark scene and suddenly they pull the curtains back it impacts like lighting is one of those things that we use very intentionally to aid the mood so that the screenwriter had an intention and then every piece of the pipeline the costume design the environment design the camera work the lighting the editing all support the vision that the screenwriter and the director had from the beginning. And hopefully every piece of the pipe is only making the story even stronger and easier to understand and more compelling — kind of with that as well. Uh sometimes color scripts are made. So kind of like every single scene has like oh we want this emotion for it. So planning out those colors and the lighting setups in advance just super loose little scribbles. I don't know if you wanted to pull up one of those. — Yeah. Answer a question. I'll pull up a color script from an actual film. Yeah, — don't [clears throat] worry. I won't show your file management on screen during all this. — Thank you. I appreciate that. — I appreciate you guys take tackling that one. Um there was one other question here. Maybe this is the right time for this. Uh John Doe had said, "I heard that at Pixar if they lit a shot without thinking about it about the story, they'd get sprayed with the hose. " — I've never heard that. I was there for almost eight years. So that's uh that's a new one. I haven't heard that before, — I think. So you were it sounds like you had to assign some sort of uh NDA maybe to go ahead and uh not to not

not talk about what was done to you guys — to protect, you know, Yeah. legally. [snorts] — Yeah. — Okay. So this was for a Netflix film called Scrooge. It's an okay film. Um, but this was the first thing that we did two years before the movie came out was I did this color script that was a first pass color script where I'm just saying this is the flow of the entire movie and just me and the director sat and talked about what is the time of day, what is the weather, what's the amount of atmosphere, what is the contrast, where is the sun, you know, what's happening in this. So, we start beautiful, happy daylight and slowly transition down. And each of these is an entire sequence. So, we're doing literally a color script versus color keys. A color script is the entire movie. And then we took these and we made them a little bit more specific to individual scenes that have a little bit more like this was real fast doing this in like maybe 30 seconds a piece, you know, doing it live. And then this was we slowed down and actually figured out exactly like you can recognize things from this. This is all part of planning a film and you know that that's what we do. So yeah, there's an example. Everything is really well thought on, you know, especially big budget films. If you're doing something with friends, you might just pull out your camera and shoot something, — you know, and that's fine. I think it's better to start with, don't worry about the lighting. Just tell the story. Make it exist first, then make it good. And the longer you get into it, the more you're like, okay, I can actually tell a compelling story. — Now, let's add in some smoke machines and some fog and some fanciness [clears throat] to it to make it easier to understand. And that's a natural progression of learning. — One of the things we also cover in the course as well is like — how to with like a super tight budget like how to creative ways of making it look better without needing to invest tons into crazy equipment. — Um like you were talking about in your course like bounce light of how just — stand beside a building that's blue and the blue is going to reflect up on your face. You want to add in that blue and that doesn't cost anything. It's just about — how do you use that knowledge? I've bought poster board that you can buy for less than a dollar and you use that as a bounce light and now you can see the whole scene. Yeah, there was a video, if you go back, there's a video that I have that's actually quite popular of like why I left my dream job at Pixar. And — if you actually pay attention to it, I was back lit with sun in, you know, the scenes there. And I was standing like this close to a building that was white to be able to balance the power. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to see my face. And a couple of people in the comments are like, "How did you light that shot? " I'm like, "Oh, yeah. I'm I like you. I like your thinking. You're noticing this stuff. " And like I literally was standing right beside a wall to have enough bounce light to balance the whole thing out. Yeah, there you go. That wall is like inches away from my, you know, arm so that I have the back lit rim of the sun and then the bounce light on the opposite side of my face. And it's a nerdy little thing to just get the shot to work and be exposed properly. So I appreciate those who notice this. — Wait, hold on here. Jeremy, you said for this shot to be exposed properly. I can see that you pulled down those highlights. — Yeah. Yes, I did, — sir. See, another nerd. Another nerd with me that could see my color grading. See, that's when the more you do this, the more you notice those things and then as you study more, like you notice that I took my highlights and I pulled them way down. — Most people don't notice that. The more you do, the more you understand it. It's cool. — Yeah. No. And I think like using things that are around you just to like environmentally give you like maximize the things that you can use, you know, I think is such a good trick there. There's a person I follow online. It's uh Jesse Driftwood. um he does some sort of like different um he does commercial production it seems as like his main focus but his YouTube channel he just shares things here and there about um about some different stuff like uh for production maybe some new tool or whatever a lot of it's become sponsored stuff but he only does the things if he wants to uh highlight something that's actually useful u but I wouldn't turn down promotion either you know g give me the multi000 thing if I just talk about it and it actually is Good. Um, but there's a video where he he was shooting this piece outside and — uh he has like this really nice like rim light kind of deal going on and he he's chosen to have the sun behind him like you did here in this piece. Um so that you're not just like with the sun all in your face. Y — uh and then it cuts to this behind the scenes kind of deal and he shows that the thing that's doing the bounce, even though he's in the middle of a pretty empty space, is a piece of trash that was nearby. It was some like political sign. It was just some like uh plastic

like uh corrugate board, you know? — Yep. — A totally viable tool. — That's part of the fun of all of this. One of the things that I love about film making over illustration. Illustration is I'm only learning by myself and I have to create everything. And so I'm just sitting by myself with my iPad or on my desktop and I'm just painting what I imagine. — Film making you never know what you're going to get. You never know when the sun is suddenly going to come out and you're going to be like that was perfect timing. It was just awesome. And then or the time where everything goes to — all right the camera's perfectly exposed and then the cloud goes away — every time. — Yep. — Cloudy weather is the worst. — And part of that is that's the fun and the joy of this whole thing of like how do you adapt? How do you keep everyone emotionally intelligent in that, you know, and like you know, how to keep everyone's energy up, you know? Like part of the thing of film making that makes it so incredibly hard is just logistics of like how do I get everyone there on the right day? — Yeah. Like we were shooting a film. You had a film that you were doing when you were a teenager that was um — what six different actors. — Are you talking about core? — Core. — Okay. Yeah. That one was tough because everyone and we were doing it like you know we weren't it wasn't paid or anything. It was just friends. So like you know one of the friends was like in the middle of a move with the family and then other people were like had they a vacation because we were just trying to do it on summer break or whatever and try and get a film out. So that was really tough to schedule everything. I forgetting people is so hard. The first real film that I did. It's really terrible. But the thing is that me and a friend, we didn't have actors. So we actually did cloning shots of ourselves. So we did visual effects. So we are all of the characters. So there's like 30 characters, but it's just two people and we're using like a tripod and cutting the video. — Uh I actually talk about how to do cloning shots in the course since it's very personal to me. Knowing how to do that is really fun. Um, so we inflated our character count using visual effects since we couldn't afford actual people. — It's a great way to do it. Uh, I have here, if you guys are interested, I think we can go over just one more question here, right? — Uh, and then I think we might be good. We've talked about — so many different things that I think are pretty useful. — I think this — so serious soup 999 in the chat. A fantastic name. — Great name, — guys. Yeah, I've seen a lot of rules about composition. But do you guys sometimes just stumble on something that feels right? Like going with feeling over rules? — Oh, absolutely. — Yeah. — All of the time. I think a lot of the rules they're they can sometimes be good guidelines. Like there's like the rule of thirds where that but the example of that K-pop scene um was the centered. You know, normally it's like, oh, never put anything perfectly center in frame. If you follow the rule of thirds too religiously, it's like always if you look at like this frame, we're kind of on it right now. We're on the third. So, you know, you have a third of the frame, you do that same top down. Um, and there's like the golden rule in a bunch of different other ones. And they can sometimes be useful to follow, but there's definitely times where you want to break that. — Um, it's just about I think communication is the most important thing of composition. Does this communicate what you want it to? Um, and then also, yeah, like the nice thing about, you know, with an illustration, it's it takes a lot of work to get perspective grid or to like really figure out how you're doing perspective. So, one of the nice things with playing with cameras and get and learning about how to use them is just playing around with like, what about this? And just move the camera around and just until you're like, wait, that one looks good. — And then you can analyze why it looks good and start building those skills. But it just like to play around and just try different things out is really useful. — The discovery of it all. I think there's a lot of film teachers that are like this was the intention of you know or even like when you're in high school English and they're like this is what the writer meant and like I don't think so. I think they just going on the flow. Maybe there was some intention in that. Like there's intention where we say there isn't intention you know and then there's not intention where they're you know like it's a mixed bag. Like I've seen a lot of people being on set like Fallout. we spent a year planning, you know, how to get, you know, getting ready for the shoot. And they're like, okay, well, you have to have one camera and they're shooting on film and how do we plan for this? And then they're like, we're in an LED volume and there's all this technical, you know, things that map the camera to the 3D space using Unreal Engine and this like it was really complicated. And then um you know, we were like they were like, can we bring two cameras? I'm like, no, it'll break the whole thing. — You can't do it with two cameras. What did we do on the shoot day? Three cameras. — Oi. And just called it good, huh? — It was like, "All right. All right. We'll just Okay. We'll just figure it out as we go. " And there's I mean, for me, I think joy in the process is really key. So whether you're painting or whether you're film making, if you're

bound by too many rules, you're going to remove the joy and then you're not going to have the ability to sustain it. So push just far enough. It's like exercise. You want to stretch yourself to the point of uncomfortable, but you don't want to like, you know, hurt yourself, but you want to push. And I feel like the same thing when it comes to rules of composition or perspective or all these different things, like go as far as you can to where it's just beyond your depth. Like I love that quote from David Bowie, you should always swim beyond your depth where your feet aren't touching bottom because that's where real creativity exists. — And I believe in that and I love it. But as long as there's still a joy in the process and being like, okay, we're not like we didn't just hate ourselves and hate the process, that's no good. But I'm trying new things and I'm growing to the point where I can understand it to say it's not a rule that I'm doing. Like that's where tools, not rules. If it's a rule, you don't understand it. If it's a tool, you do understand it. You know the why you would use it. Learn the why and then you'll know whether the rule is good or not. [clears throat] — Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, like the there there's so many things that they started as being against the rules because the rules of the time were such uh for composition or something else like that or even how you make a cookie, you know, at some point in time someone decided I'm going to put flake salt on the outside of my cookie and everyone thought that was insanity. It's delicious. — Why not try new things? And yeah, maybe you put the wrong thing on there. Did you see the um there was an interview with who was the actor who was like my favorite sandwich and it was — pa peanut butter sauce and yeah Jeff Daniels and then like you know sour cream and onion chips and everybody who has gone like that sounds horrible and they try it and they're like it's not as bad as you think. — Yeah. Like I don't think I'm gonna try it. — But — there's the one that I thought for this that's like the food corollary one. It was the idea of the mustard on watermelon. — So, — sounds insane. Uh, but you It's because you can't conceptualize what those two flavors are together, but they work together to make something different. — I dip my French fries in my chocolate shake. So, — as you should. — Yes. You know, that's really good. The sweet and the salty work really well together. — I have one quick example here. That was one I just saw uh yesterday that I saved because I thought it was a fun one. — Uh this is an example of traditionally recognized composition rules. Uh so this is uh Hiberty Sales. — Yeah, — I don't know. I don't know who this person is. Um but yeah, this these are the things that we've got here. So the rule of thirds is a pretty classic one that we all use. Your phone probably prompts you to possibly turn this on when you first open a camera on a new phone or something. Um the golden ratio was one that you were talking about there uh earlier uh Cedar when you had mentioned some um that's what they were calling the golden spiral here. — Uh some of these let's just horizontal radiating these things are things that you see in something and you use these all the time without even knowing about it. When you make something accidentally chances are that it probably adheres quote unquote to one of these rules or combines a couple of them. Uh my favorite thing in all composition ever for photography or video is to have something lightly obscuring the corner of the frame. Yeah. — Uh out of focus to introduce the idea of depth, you know, it gives you context for where you are, the point of view of the thing, — all of that stuff. If I if you set something up where I like if uh Jeremy and Cedar here, if they had just like leaves just around the frame around them uh and you were looking through the thing, it implies that you're a voyer or something. You know, there's it you have to uh you try to create a narrative for why this thing is there. Those things are important. Um and you will accidentally make a bunch of these things. Sometimes it'll be great, sometimes it'll be bad because you're accidentally suggesting something else. You know, — I have an entire thing where I talk about, and this is more in my painting light courses, but I do mimic this in the exact thing in the photography course as well. This is the way I think about it. What is your focal point? Can you draw [snorts] attention to use lines in your scene to draw attention to that one thing? Can I understand its shape? Then once you understand it shape, then can I understand the form inside of that shape? Then do I have contrast? Do I have depth? Do I have separation? We have separation because of the rim light that's behind us separates. Especially on Cedar where he's sitting. He's popped off the background because of that. So these are so there's lighting rules and there's geometric compositional rules. — I talk about all of those things. So

instead of it being a random list of random items like what I don't know whether I when would I choose a diagonal you can also you know like know those are options but then go you know focal point shape form depth repetition to tell your audience understand the world that I'm showing you. So putting [clears throat] something in the foreground and something in the background slightly out of focus is a great way to say I recognize that's a tree leaf and then there's another one in the background. I know now the distance because I can relate to human elements. — And again, it starts becoming less of a randomness. Like I have an entire video on YouTube for free for everyone is the curse of um uh random or the accidental success, — you know, and it's all about that whole thing of like a lot of people go and do photography and like 5% of their photos are awesome, but they have no idea why. They're just kind of like randomly clicking everywhere and then some of their photos are good. If you can start understanding the why of what makes good photos good and bad photos bad and again it's all subjective anyway, your success rate will go from being 5% success to being 80% success. Like I think a professional cinematographer 20% of the time their shots are also going to look bad. And oh yeah, that's just normal because the cloud came over the shot or you chose poorly. But you try to learn to go a the difference between a hobbyist and a professional is not the quality of the work. It's the percent chance that you get it correct and how quickly you do it — in my mind. — Okay. Um they did ask another good question here. I want to ask one thing before I close out with an actual final question here. Um so the other question that we had was from uh Tamokisan again asking do they do critique on projects in this proco course. — Will you guys be offering feedback for submissions on that course? — Uh — this is up to you guys. Not every instructor does. Some instructors do not. — So we put at the end of the whole course — if there's time for it. I mean I wouldn't be able to guarantee that I'd be able to look at everything. — Yeah, that's fair. We did put a little thing at the end of the course to say because I don't necessarily always get on Proco to see all of the comments. I have my own YouTube channel and I have other companies I'm working with and a lot of different things, but I do have an email address artlightingmentor. com — art lightingmentor. com. If you want feedback, you can write to us. Again, don't assume that we will for free give it feedback to you. But I love seeing what people create. And if we have time to give you a sentence or two about here's your film, here's how we think you can improve, then awesome. I will try to do that. But again, don't ever assume that professionals have time to respond to everyone because sometimes we get thousands upon thousands of submissions and comments. Like I've tried on my YouTube channels to go through and reply to every comment. And then it reached a point where if I have a video with a million views and then there's like, you know, uh 2,000 comments, I'm like, I don't have the time to go through everyone. I will try to. I want to. — So, as much as possible, if you're making things, I mean, — especially if you take the course and you do some of the projects that we give you, we would love to see it. I mean, it would be super fun to see it. and then to talk with you if you can. And if you want something more than a sentence or two, we offer mentorship, you know, like if you want, you know, it could be a one-off thing or longer term thing to go like really help me dig into, — you know, my portfolio and building that and that is something that is offered as well. It is a paid thing because it takes time to do that. So, if you want to do that, you can look I have a whole section on my website about that. But again, I want to offer free on YouTube and I want to have courses that you can do by yourself. And then for those that are really like, I want to work in this industry, then you can have the real one-on-one custom guided feedback for you in particular. — Yeah. — For those who want it, I don't expect everyone to do that and spend money. That's fine. We want to have all of the tiers for all the different type of people. — Absolutely. Yeah. No, it's not a I think it's a feature, not a bug. I think you you're making it so that the people who do get to reach out to you more directly, uh they get to have more of your time because of it being a more like a thing that you don't put more time into. So, you have more time in those times when something does pop up that's truly worth giving feedback on, — right? — Um this the same goes for when someone actually does pay you for a mentorship. Again, they have everyone's time has an actual cost. Regardless of how someone out there might feel about their own time, it's a thing that you need to respect for yourself. And every single one of us as people who are trying to help someone uh establish a healthy professional career as a creative, it's [snorts] a thing that you should get in early is the idea that your time is worth money. Even if that's the

idea is supposed to be that you're doing something to pursue a possible amount of success, you should still be compensated in some way outside of just that chance for exposure or something. And this is an extension of that. — Yeah. There's things that we do where we volunteer. I have a lot of people that I give my courses to for free if I know their story and they've told me why their story is compelling, you know, and I volunteer in a lot of different ways using my art 100% for the good of humanity, but also sustainability. I don't know. I mean, all of this is it. Life is complicated and it comes with a lot of things and I just want to see everyone thrive wherever you're at. — Yeah, absolutely. All right, we we'll do this one last question here from Wolf Nightly. They ask, "Do you always think of them in that order as a checklist? " I think at this point in time, this was uh about you talking about depth, I believe. — Um so like the shape of something um that you can read the read it clearly. Uh, and do you guys agree on this is also another question I would ask — because maybe you have different ideas. — I mean I would say that I mean with checklist type stuff a lot of it tends to be is it communicating what you want it to. So sometimes depending on the situation it can be out of order like there's certain things that are more important in different situations. I mean everything is situational would be the thing I would kind of say. Mhm. — Um, I mean, if it's a tool that helps, like if that checklist helps, I don't, you know, when I'm making a composition or whatever, it tends to be just kind of more intuitive and more just like what is the story moment and I'm really focused on the story and then it's like I have all these potential options for how I can say that in the story and then I explore which one works the best for that particular instance. Mhm. — If you know how to ride a bicycle, the first time you ride a bicycle, you're very aware of where your feet are, where the ground is, where your handle bar is, and it's just really nerve-wracking. The first time you drive a car, my turn signals, are my mirrors right? Am I looking in front of me? Am I looking behind me, and am I doing all of these different things? Am I aware of where the car is? But you really quickly get to the point where you can have a conversation driving a car through traffic in a city, and you don't have to think about it anymore. So when you're starting you are thinking about the checklist I button my you know my seat belt and then this and then that and pretty soon it starts becoming subconscious and you don't have to think about it anymore and I think the same thing happens to go the only thing that comes back to my mind is what's the point of this shot why am I even doing this let's make sure that it's really clear and let me do a couple of different shots so I do probably the one that comes up the most like I might intuitively put foreground midground background repeating shapes where I don't have to consciously think about it anymore. Like I just know it's going to look better if I do that. I'm going to be like finding those shots until that's it. That's the area that gives the most amount of depth and there's, you know, and that's where it's almost like happy accidents of like this could be my leading lines that'll draw me into, you know, like there's a path going off into the distance. Great. And I will just try to find what I can find. But the whole point is the story and the point. What's the point of this shot? Nothing random. — Yeah. Okay. I appreciate these. All right. Is there anything that else that you guys want to say here in these final couple minutes of this where we say our goodbyes? — Not in particular. I feel like we've covered so much. — Yeah. This Thanks for taking the time. This is like a full two hours. For those who have stayed, thank you for staying. I hope it's been engaging. I hope it triggers your imagination. And I would encourage everyone. I'm going to say the bit of advice that I give to everyone. If you've spent two hours watching this video, spend four hours creating films. Spend more time actually creating than talking about creating. And that's where you'll actually grow. So filling your brain is like a funnel. And if you just fill up your mind knowledge and you don't let it sink down into your soul and into your fingers and into your art, you will not learn actually truly learn these things. So after you've taken this information, spend more time creating than talking about creating or learning about creating. You have to actually go do it. go shoot short films, go shoot photos, go make illustrations, go draw, go, you know, learn and create, you know, and that's how I've always approached this. That's why we've shot so many — hundreds upon hundreds of films and so many different movies and games and projects and thousands, tens of thousands of drawings because it's fun and that's where you really learn. — Yeah. Absolutely. Don't the thing that I've started saying recently is uh telling people not to be tutorial tourists. get out there, just go and make a thing. Don't just watch the stuff and think like, "Ah, yes, now I know how to do such and such. " — Yep. — Maybe you do in that moment, but until you do the thing, you don't really know it. It's just some academic idea that you have in that minute. You know, — you breathe. — Oh, it's better to apply one idea like

and actually internalize it than to take a hundred ideas that Yeah. you never do anything with. — You breathe in, you breathe out. You have to do both. Consuming media is breathing in. [snorts] Making something is breathing out. And they both take time energy and they're different from one another. And you've got to do both. If you only do one, you're not going to survive very long. — So, thank you everyone, like you guys said, for being here. You guys hung out for a good long time. Some of these people asked questions in the beginning and then asked questions right at the end. So, they were here for the whole freaking thing and that's wonderful to see. Um, go check out the course. You can find it right now over on ProCo for 25% off. But you don't just have to buy it on ProCo, which you can find in the link right down below. You can also buy that over at lightingmentor. com. That is Jeremy's website uh where there are other courses that he's got um like his painting courses that he's been talking about where you can learn bunch of these other concepts again that were mentioned in this stream that are in those courses. Um, you can also find some other things like a course that he talked about yesterday that is just a uh smaller drawing fundamentals course that is only available on lightingmentor. com. — Uh you I'm sure that you can follow him on socials and every once in a while if he posts uh maybe from his personal account or from his lighting mentor account uh some photography or other things that you find interesting, you can sneak in and get a little question in for free every once in a while, some free advice. Uh, so I highly recommend that. And, uh, if you want to go check out any of the things that we've talked about so far, the films we talked about were K-pop Demon Hunters, Knives Out, and Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. They're all great. They've all got fun stuff going on in them, and they've got the victory stamp of approval. — Yes. — Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it and I hope that people pick up the