Spielberg talked about this in an old interview. I'm not sure if he still does this, but he said he likes to use deep focus and wider angles than other directors because he feels a lot of movies over direct the viewer's eye. He prefers to have the audience feel like the director, if they want to wander around the frame, they're free to do so without bokeh or tight framing telling them they cant.
I watched Jurassic Park recently and then watched some supplemental material related to the movie, and while watching this video I was thinking, y'know, I feel like Spielberg might do this because there were so many shots that really let the actors and scenes breathe. You never feel overly zoomed into the characters during dialogue. Jurassic Park is a real treat to watch.
@@Selrisitai It really is. Jurassic Park just works on a level i can apreciate more and more every time i watch it. I wasn't even a big fan when i was a kid back when it was released. And i'm not a Spielberg superfan. But today i totally feel at ease with Jurassic Park just because it is crafted so well and everything is just working together like a clockwork. It just is one of the perfect blockbusters.
Perfect explanation. In modern films, I find myself pausing the video and just looking at the framing, because they; the director and editor; are forcing me to look at certain things I don't wish to look at in the scene. My theory is, "Show me what's happening, and me the viewer, will decide what is worth paying attention too." Love Spielberg!
Actually only the greatest director use deep focus quite a lot. I'd even dare to say that most directors (because they aren't great at what they do) use a very shallow depth of field, Bokeh. Actually it is even understandable that when we use bokeh it's because we lack in other skills like: crystal clear motivated Blocking and frame composition. If you have a fast lense everybody can make a bokeh, which means no skill required. Yes it looks nice, but it has to be motivated.
As a professional in video/film, I'm confident that the shot at 0:24 used as an example of an 'easy wide angle' was actually a longer focal length - it was not a wide, you can tell by the compression (apparent distance foreground to background). The reason it's in focus is that the further away from the lens you're focusing, the larger the depth of field. Since the army, building and background are all far away from the camera, they all stay in focus.
Kurosawa was also known for, especially later in his career, for utilizing longer lenses, filming from further away to give the actors more space and to create that larger look. High and Low is a great example of this before Ran and Kagemusha.
A funny historic annecdote: in Hitchcock's "Spellbound", his cinematographer refused to stop down because shallow depth of field was more pleasing for close ups. This was a problem because he wanted to do a POV with a gun in frame, pointed at Ingrid Bergman. Hitch's solution was to use a GIANT novelty hand and gun so it would be less out of focus 😅
There is a scene in Suspiria by Dario Argento where they drink from a super large wine glass. If you’ve seen the movie then you know the shot. True masters at work $
Besides painting, Kurosawa was also inspired by theatre, another medium where you can see everything on the stage (in frame) at the same time. His use of deep focus is one of the bigger contributors to crafting the theatrical feeling of his movies imho.
In photography, it's generally more challenging to compose well when everything is in focus and you can't rely on shallow dof to obscure distracting background elements. I imagine in cinematography that's also the case, probably more-so. But when it is pulled off well, it's hard to beat. It can add so much richness to a frame.
In cinema it is also a great tool that 1. helps to conseal some problems with the set. 2. allows to switch the attention of the viewer with the rack focus.
not to mention that shallow depth of field looks "pro" to many clients. hence smartphone manufacturers trying, (and failing, as of 23) to mimic this optical effect. I really enjoy the fact that that "pro" look came out of necessity originally, but shallow DOF does definitely work well for adding 3d "ness" undeniable.. And yes composing with deep focus is potentially infinitely more difficult.
Yes, that's the point, when done well, then it gives a lot to the whole end product. But "more challenging", so what? When you choose this profession and when you spend millions of dollars on a movie, your job is to overcome these challenges, and if you are a good director, or whatever, then you enjoy these challenges.
Everything isn't always in focus for human eyes. If I hold a hand in front of my face, and stare at a wall behind it, my hand is blurry and out of focus. If I focus on my hand, it becomes sharp and the wall becomes blurry.
Yes, I was going to point this out too. I suspect that if everything was in focus all the time, our brains would be overloaded. The optics of the human eye aren't fundamentally much different to a glass lens. What 'IS' different is that it's attached to a very powerful brain. We actually 'see' with our brains. The brain interprets and assembles what our eye is taking in. So it assembles a scene as if all the parts are in focus and deletes some objects entirely that it deems unimportant. There are simple tests you can do to confirm this.
Has nothing to do with the brain getting overloaded or needing glasses like some ppl are mentioning. Eyes cannot focus everything at once. Eyes are just lenses with sensors. It physically cannot focus everything at once. Look into light field cameras. They use a different way of sensing that collects more information about the incident light. This allows the changing of focus in image post processing. Our brains do compensate for this and a lot of it is masked because what ever we are mentally focusing on we usually have our eyes optically focus on. If you consciously mentally focus on things not in the direct optical focus of you eyes you will realize they are not focus. You have to consciously not move your eyes to do this because subconscious your brain would just move your optical focus to the new subject of interest. This is a limitation of your eyes as an optical sensing device and not a limitation of your brains image processing. I suppose your brain could do some really fancy image processing and recover some focus for parts of your field of vision that are optically out of focus but that is unnecessary as our eyes can easily move and refocus. Its a waste of processing power but its not as if our brains could not feasibly do that if it was necessary. Assuming our brain had the same amount of processing power but we evolved with eyes that could not change focal length and could not easily change directions.
Deep focus presents an objective (observer) experience whereas shallow focus does a subjective experience. Deep focus doesn’t just imitate the traditional Japanese painting but also a live theater experience, which leave such freedom for the viewer to feel all the characters on stage and the tension between them.
Not just the Japanese theatre, but most theatre of the previous age for the time. One viewing a play in a Theatre only ever sees everything going on, including scene (set) and sometimes even costume changeovers. There is no guesswork for the patrons at an amiptheatre: the work of any live story, before fine art cinema, portends that the viewer is omniscient and respects the grounds on which that rests.
@@sacredxgeometry I feel you're saying something that I want to hear. But the way you're saying it is confusing to me. Could you maybe restate it in simple, declarative sentences (?) What is the difference, as you understand it, between how people see things in a "theatre" . . . and how they see them in an "amphitheatre" (?) Thanks . . .
@@mental_time_travel oh no, there is no difference. There is however a difference between a live audience in the 20th century or before seeing everything that is intended, and the modern audience who has to tangle and fight with nuanced fine art cinema.
Thank you for this. I’ve been trying to teach this with my students. That shallow depth isn’t necessarily cinematic. There is a time and place but deep focus has its time and place as well.
As a photographer, i like kurosawa because in every frame, I can tell what's going on even without dialogue. He can tell a story through visual alone. While DOP todays are mostly focus on the actor's face, you can't tell what's happening just by looking at someone's face.
But storytelling is not only about environmental context. Psychological context also matters. A close-up on the actors face with environment out of focus enables us to see what is going on the the minds of the characters.
@@jewulo if you only focus on their faces, you miss out on their movements, body language, how they interact with their surroundings. People can emote with their whole body, and Kurosawa movies are great examples of people acting with their whole body
@@Archontasil also Kurosawas movies are a great example of movies being more than just the actors... there's so much work that went into EVERY little detail in the set in the environment in the clothing in everything.... Actors are just part of the movie not THE movie
@@jewulo To separate the environment from the psychology is a mistake. Human beings interact with the environment and are affected by it. You could just have a close up of an actor's face being sad, but if coupled with a visual environmental effect such as rain the scene can be way more impactful. Or if you want to show a person being angry or sinister, using fire can really emphasize those emotions. Maybe using extreme winds to express urgency, or fast running water to show fear. Watch Kurosawa's movies with attention, you'll notice that he uses the actors' acting and the environment together to produce a really impactful scene. In fact, watch Dersu Uzala.
As a kid, I noticed Kurosawa's films have unique, epic quality about them, even if it's just two actors against a tree. Now I know it was deep focus. Shallow focus looks cozy and intimate, deep focus looks grandiose and operatic.
I appreciate you bringing up this other story telling tool of deep focus. We get locked into the shallow look, but deep focus has it's place too. The scenes you showed were incredible.
You’re thinking more with digital imagers in mind. Film cameras are pretty fixed to 1/48th of a second at 24 fps. Film stocks in those classic Kurosawa films were between 50-100 iso range. At 50 iso, in broad daylight, you’re stopped all the way down to get exposure. Make it worse, they’d use reflectors to brighten the actors faces. So you’re at f11 easily all the time, maybe F16. Unless you had filtration, you’d always have a very flat image, more akin to smaller gauges like 16mm. The reason why so many classic films shot this way is only because it was way easier to focus. They didn’t have silent reflex cameras until the 70s. Even then, it took a long time before the viewfinders were bright enough to nail focus when a lens is wide open. So yes, the main reason why people in the past shot more flat is 100% technical and has little to do with choice.
Thank you. I see it all the time that young TH-cam content creators tend to have retcon answers to historical problems without any practical experience
The reason for digital making such rapid progress was almost wholly economic. Film production and post-production ate up serious portions of a film's budget. That film did certain things well, and digital does certain things better, is known. 70mm film stocks meant shallower DOF at same angle view because of inherently longer focal lengths, and more tele compression, too. Conversely there are ever-smaller digital sensors with excellent IQ. f/2 starts to look like f/22 of old. Better get used to deep focus
True, but even nowadays using deep focus is actually quite neat. It's a pitty so little tend to use it. I love deep focus shots. Terrence Malick is someone who loves deep focus in most of his movies.
@@Leprutz I think people believe it’s cheap looking. It’s super easy to stop down and get everything in focus. It’s hard to get things in focus with a more shallow depth of field. The majority of big budget films strive for a more shallow depth of field look because it’s more cinematic in many ways.
@@NarrowGaugeFilmsLLC sorry but again. Wrong. Cinematic is not about how the shot looks. Cinematic is how you tell your story through those shots that you meticulosly compose. Shallow depth of fiel is in no way easyier than deep focus. Deep focus looks only cheap when the storyteller doesn't know shit about composition. Shallow depth of field can also be cheap if overused. In fact the series Euporia is in my opinion a horrible looking show. Everything is way too blurry. It is all but cinematic. But hey it's my opinion.
Our eyes don't always have everything in focus at once, but when we concentrate on different parts of a scene, our eyes shift focus on them. Try looking at your finger, then quickly shift to a distant object, and you will notice your focus shifting.
are we talking about 1:15 ? because he's not saying "everything is always equally sharp" as seen through our eyes or a camera... he's saying things as independent objects (with no observer) are always equally sharp, which is obviously true. it's our focus that makes things blurry.
@@Zacryptocerus it's functionally true though - the same f stop on a wider lens will achieve a deeper field of focus than a long lens, especially at closer distances.
Very instructive. Kurosawa’s way of working was certainly that he drew sketchbooks with clear intent and easthetic, that’s the movie. How it has to be shot is a technical issue only.
Interesting video and great topic. The only thing I would disagree is calling the shot at 0:25 a wide angle shot/lens. It’s clearly shot with a longer lens, at least 50mm and possibly more. The compression of the image gives it away. Even the Rashomon shots at the temple are barely wide angle. Kurosawa barely used wide lenses as opposed to Welles who used wide lenses a lot. Also achieving deep focus outside during daylight is the easiest thing ever. You just close the aperture and move away as much as needed. Inside and during night is of course a completely different challenge.
I remember you discussing deep focus in your earlier video, covering Jean Renoir's masterpiece, "Rules of the Game", and I am glad to hear you telling us more about it here. Thank you! 👍
It seems the business side of film often interferes with the creative process when your budget is limited. It's like hard decisions must be made because time is money. That's probably the case with most inexperienced film makers. I really appreciate your work.
Again, I think it is just laziness, and the easiest way to make something """more cinematic""" is the overuse of shallow depth of field. To me it is very annoying, when even distant scenes have SDoF, it bothers my eyes that not everyting is in focus. Same example as always, the 90s did a great job on this part, distant scenes had deep focues, everything was sharp, but many times even mid shots were full sharp, while close ups had nice shallow depth of field. You can find this in almost every 90s blockbuster. Since the digital camera era, people try to reinvent the wheel, and spend tons of time on making their shots look like a 90s movie, still fails tho, because the result is usually an overcolorgraded two tone dark something with tons of shallow depth of field.
Stanley Kubrick was a master of his craft and very rarely used a shallow depth of field. The lenses he used had loads of character because of their faults which gave his films a unique look.
Though we have greater latitude and more colour information so it's a bit of a renaissance if you will it probably will calm down. We can do more so we will, it is in our nature. Also we have larger sensors for more control and tech that can help us achieve shots that would have only been dreamt of in the 90s. I wouldn't look at what we do now with so much disdain tbh. But that's my 2c
I think it's also important to look at the context of a scene like the rain, and the fight you were talking about. All of those elements need to be in focus for a scene like that to keep the narrative throughline. With the rain it's an oppressive natural phenomena dulling the senses and emotions of the characters, so it becomes part of the scene and therefore the shot. With the fight each character's focus and eye line is important to maintain the tension of the scene and show that at no point is any one of them losing focus on what they want, or showing weakness or distraction for even a moment. Sure there's personal and artistic choices that go into a scene holding deep focus in that way, but there's also reasons that serve the film, the scene, and the characters.
Fr, this mdfk trying to tell us is just a personal choice by the great Akira, like he never thought about what you are saying. He is well known for out-of-this-world scene blocking
Personally I really dislike shallow depth of field. Once I noticed it, I couldn't stop seeing it. So now any time I see deep focus I feel a great sense of relief
Regarding the scene at 6:27. It's just a conjecture - but perhaps Kurosawa fought for deep focus in that scene, because the film is ABOUT the three, diverging narratives of the same event (the 'Rashamon effect'), so showing the three faccial expressinons just when the violence is about happen has a meaning in relation to the concept of the movie. My two cents...keep it up man, just discovered your channel and I LOVE it!
I would think it's telling a very different story, depending on whether three characters are seen separately or in one shot. Showing them in seperate images focuses on the characters' individuality while seeing all three together not only shapes a triangle (which most people connect with tension) but it also focuses the attention on the relationship of the characters instead of their individual existence.
Using a shallow depth of field for every shot just shouts to me "I don't want to block". It's fine if you want to focus on the performances but if your movie is just a bunch of floating heads and there's no relation to the geographical space other than your obligatory wide shot your film professor told you to shoot at the beginning of the scene then you shouldn't be directing movies. There is just so much you're missing out on if you only decide to shoot on lower apertures (looking at you Zack Snyder). The space your characters live in is incredibly important and treating master shots as "oh it's the wide shot I have to shoot at the beginning" limits the amount of visual storytelling. The worst part is that blocking requires no money, you just have to sit down and think about it for a minute. Filmmakers who refuse to even think about doing anything else than shot-reverse-shot are lazy and if they're so in love with focusing on only the performances of how characters spell out dialogue then they should go into radio dramas, not cinema.
Kubrick and Kurosawa both used long lenses with deep focus to compress and flatten the FOV. Though both directors had exceptions to this, they often used this technique to present the action as if viewed from an omnipotent, impartial, god-like perspective. Also if your last name doesn't begin with a K you can't become a legendary filmmaker.
"omnipotent, impartial, god-like perspective" - For that see Miklos Jancso's "The Red and the White" 1967. Also to lesser extent in Malick's "Badlands" (1973).
This video rocks dude. I've never heard anyone explain something this technical and complicated in a way that makes me - a total amateur - feel like i completely understand that aspect including how the technology of all this influences the choices that are made. One of my favorite movies, Michael Mann's Miami Vice film adaptation, does this a lot but cranks the shutter speed to a gazillion so the scenes at night don't need to be lit at all, and the entire movie is shot on location so the entire movie are these beautifully composed, super dark but colorful, dream-like images, and I feel like I finally understand how Michael Mann accomplished this.
Shallow depth of field should be used not just as a "cinematic style" but in the film's visual language. You're taking away information, the world loses it's sharpness. This could be when the character you're portraying is in a mental state where he or she is disconnected from the world around them, in deep thoughts, deeply in love, depressed etc. As a director you are constantly thinking of how to tell the story to the audience as effectively as possible and the choice of DoF should be part of that. It is definitely very annoying that directors overuse SDoF even if it doesn't serves the narrative, and it is often even disrespectful to the viewer that you leave them no choice to look at the thing you exactly point out to them. It's like a huge red arrow pointing to a face screaming "this is important, forget the rest!"... if a director blocks correctly and has the lights properly set up you don't need to cheapen the shots like this. Same goes with just making everything deep focus because it's hard to do... if it doesn't drive the narrative then it's not always the right choice (as Wolfcrow also pointed out with the rain in the background).
IMO shallow focus is cheap. It's a typical giveaway of a cheap production: tight shoots and shallow focus. Where as wide shoots and deep focus is hard. Not so much from a technical side, but you have to control so much of your background and have so much understanding of composition and you may need we more takes to get the shoot you want.
One of my favorite films using deep focus is Harry Potter Prisoner of Azkaban. Mainly due to the use of wide lenses, there’s barely any “bokeh” effect on the background.
You miss out on one other aspect--- when a film is projected in a cinema, it is GIGANTIC, and modern shallow focus looks ridiculous. Deep focus creates a reasonably interesting view, as people's eyes wander over the enormous screen. This experience is hard to replicate even with large home flatscreen televisions, but if you are actually in a cinema, a Welles film, or a Kurasawa film, is just infinitely more INTERESTING to see than anyone else's films.
The irony of what you've talked about is that Kurosawa was using a lot of long lenses, just from super far away. That's why they're so dynamic yet so flat, it's zoomed in from aaggeesss away. To me it makes it even more impressive though
Check out hyper focal guides! Hyper focus, a development attributed to Ansel Adams, and used for Citizen Kane, uses math to encapsulate the entire image into the circle of confusion (area of focus basically). Because light gets fairly distorted (defraction) around f/16 - f/22, it's not simply a matter of stopping down to increase your depth of field. There is a hyper focal length based upon the frame size, the focal length, and the aperture that will capture the entire image perfectly in focus without any defraction, which much, much more detail than if you had your image set to an f/16 on a 12mm lens. For example, if you want to shoot the movie on 35mm film, around an f/8, on a 50mm lens, you would need to set the focal length to 35 feet. But only around 8 feet for a 25mm lens.
Shallow depth of field was the norm a long time ago. I can't help thinking it was mainly because the film was slow, necessitating wider f stops to achieve exposure. If you watch older movies, such as Casablanca, there is rarely any fore and aft movement of actors; they tend to keep a constant distance between themselves and the camera (otherwise they would either go out of focus, or require the camera operator to track them by moving the plane of focus in compensation). Welles liked depth of field; maybe that was one reason he tended to use wide angle lenses, since it's easier to maintain depth of field when using the shorter focal lengths. Kurosawa wanted depth and tended to prefer longer focal lengths, and I think I remember seeing a remark from one of his staff about that requiring more light, more artificial light, in order to maintain exposure. The examples given lump together several Kurosawa films, but perhaps one should remember that Rashomon was shot by Miyagawa, whereas The Seven Samurai and Ran were shot by Nakai.
I like this, and the intelligence, the close observation, and carefully considered analyses of other Wolfcrow videos. I do think though that in _Rashomon_ there is a cinematic justification for the frequent deep focus, quite apart from Kurosawa's background and worldview. The background sets, with their sharpness and oddity need to be seen because they buttress the pointedness and oddity of the story in addition to a point made below about it allowing us to discern better the relationship between the characters. Even the rain needs to be sharply discerned as it seems almost to pierce the characters. Here, cinematic technique strengthens the flow and structure of the entire narrative. Shallow focus would have diminished the whole thing to the point of psychological blandness and narrative weakness. One cannot show otherwise simply by isolating a particular shot, putting the background out of focus, then innocently asking what harm would have been done. For a still photograph, none perhaps, but it would have wrecked the film. Besides, we do not see individual shots in grand isolation. Rather, each adds to an entire context, which in turn proves the meaning of the whole. We must remember also that motion in cinema changes the psychology at play. We simply cannot analyse film as we would analyse still photography.
It is not about focal length (wide angle or telephoto) but about the aperture and what is the distance to the closest object you are photographing. Fo some reason cinematographers and photographers do not care to learn how to analyze one simple formula of lens optics: 1/x+1/y=1/f.
I am surprised you didn't mention hyperfocus at all. As this was and is utilised a lot. Maybe your not aware yourself though, which is also fine. For anyone interested a hyper focal length is the distance from any giving lens where you have infinity focus. This would be harder to use with teles though but did noticed you were on anamorphic lenses so gives a proportionally wider fov. I would have also suggested a different camera for your short. Crazy to say but maybe even an a7s you might want to curl your nose at this, as it is not raw or a true cinema camera and anamorphic would have been hard though you would have had insane lowlight 10 bit 422 prores which should give plenty of information. There are other cameras too that would have yielded a much better low light performance from Sony or canon the c700 to think of one. But this is never the only reason to choose a camera. Any way great video and very insightful
I am a photographer, not a cinematographer or director, but this is still important to my craft. Composition and DOF - bokeh -is becoming more and more overlooked with the modern camera, but the emphasis you out on why and when here is important IMO. Thank you and hope many people pay attention.
Bokeh as it is called now was once considered a fault. What was once a gradually defocused background now has to have a sharp cut off and paper thin DoF ;)
I personally prefer using a split-focus diopter. I find a good middle ground between deep focus and a more shallow depth of field. Robert Wise and Richard Kline together used it a lot in their careers. So does Brian De Palma. Kurosawa used a lot of telephoto which I've never been a huge fan of (other than in High and Low... which is my personal favorite film he's made). Welles ended up using a lot of wide-angle lenses in his later career (Touch of Evil and Falstaff are two prime examples). Telephoto flatten an image too much for my liking, though there are certainly numbers of example where it works masterfully.
That wide shot from Ran with the building burning is NOT with a wide angle lens. It's with a longer lens as you can tell by the compression of the frame between the soldiers and the building.
I think it's not that forgotten, more people would do it but they dont have an art department, good locations, or high output lights necessary to make most situations look good
A smaller sensor (C4K) will produce a deeper DoF than 35mm film stock with the same angle of view. Image circle diameter. Shutter speed can be made faster than the frame rate but not slower. Yes it is usually half the frame rate or 180° ISO 6400 is generally onset of noise but you may notice reduced dynamic range. Signal to noise ratio, it depends on how the camera handles that. Digital movie can sometimes run 2 stops slower than stills require. Diffraction depends on the lens and its aperture leaves. A good lens doesn't generally diffract until approaching f/16 and then you'd have to look for it. It can be used for effect. I don't know why some videographers like some pretty dire lenses for their character and look.
Not everything in our field on view is sharp, only the things we focus at. The blurriness outside of what we focus on only become apparent when looking at something close to your eyes. Just like an aperture, our pupil decides the amount of blur - If it's very bright (like outside in the sun) the amount of blur behind the focused object is less because your pupil is contricted. It's hard to observe directly, but just like you can notice things in your periphery, you can definitely "see" the blur. Try it out. Put your fingers close to your eyes, focus, notice the blur in the background. Try it in a darker room and then out in the sun. The focus shift usually also is faster when it's bright. It's pretty cool, our eyes function very similar to a camera lens - Stereotypic 3D organic camera lenses. Trying to look when it's dark outside, you can even notice how the darker there is, the more noise there is, and colors are harder to make out - just like ISO on a camera. Enjoy!
Shallow depth of field is over used due to the popularity of large sensor cameras. If you want do get deep focus with a modern camera M43rds its a good choice.
One simple rule : if you have a living element or a moving element that's important for the premise of the story, you got to use deep focus. Eg. : If a character is stranded in a desert, you got to show the scale and that's only possible via deep focus. And maybe, if you're shooting a war movie, you might wanna set the offensive atmosphere for the protagonist(s) like Stanley Kubrick did in Full Metal Jacket by not using shallow depth of field but actually giving out the atmospheric details to the viewers and how hostile it would have been for the characters. IMO, in the movie Joker, the element of focus was the protagonist who's delusional and kind of self-centred and so, it was absolutely necessary to convey it through the visuals.
Movies of the 30's, 40's, & 50's had a tendency to be sharply focused. In the 60's, extreme shallow focus became more popular. By extreme is the focal plane is focused on a very narrow band, like a newspaper while the person's face reading it is blurred, and some object in front of the paper also out of focused. Part of the idea of shallow focus is to create the feeling of normal 3d, like when you eyes focus on a subject, and what is in front what is behind is not focused upon. I personally like deep focus, though shallow focus can be useful and very effective. However the worst Shallow focus shot I ever saw was an extreme shallow focus shot in a 3D movie. The shot was of three people standing near each other, staggered. Though they at most were three feet apart in distance from the camera. only the middle person was in sharp, detailed focus. The fore ground and background characters were blurry. I actually got a headache as I kept trying to focus on the other two in the shot.
the easiest way to get deeper focus is to use a smaller sensor, which is how eyes and phone cameras get such deep focus, the iris is not big enough to create significant depth of field
Love the nod to f.22. An honorable mention would be Christopher Nolans' use of the iMax camera in The Dark Knight; a modern popular movie that used shallow depth of field to no end and seemed to have sparked other high profile action directors and Hollywood producers to approve of this, otherwise, low-budget style, for more expensive productions.
Fully agree. I am not a professional photographer, but I am an avid cyclist in Switzerland. Often I want a picture with my bike in the foreground and a mountain range in the background. Here compression is important, which means stand at a significant distance from the foreground object and zoom in to get the background in focus and also appropriately large, to become an equal element of the picture.
would be interested in deep focus film after newer small sensor cinema camera released, we could have large aperture while still keeping things in focus.
Interesting video. I've wondered why people keep on going on about bokeh being cinematic when most of the examples I can think of have deep focus. One other thing. Do you remember that strange effect in some older movies where they cheated getting deep focus. For example in star trek the motion picture. You have say, spock speaking to captain kirk and spock would be in focus in the background and the back of kirks head would be in focus in the foreground but there would be this cut around the foreground subject where there should be blur. Its hard to explain but its like having two shots stuck together. These shots would always be stationary. P.s. Just remembered, you can also see this in close encounters of the third kind a lot too.
It's a little too complex of a subject for the explanation. Deep depth of field requires a small aperture, and therefore tons of very strong light. The human eye doesn't focus on everything. It focuses on a small bullseye of what it sees. Hence, a shallow depth of field with blurry background is favored to recreate what the mind experiences. New post-production digital techniques will allow for blurring areas of the frame that are in perfect focus too. I'd disagree that deep focus is preferred to shallow focus. A technique that allows the eye to bounce around the screen as if a movie were a stage play on the screen might favor deep focus, but for storytelling, shallow depth of field is preferred, with numerous tight shots and camera angles. A film is not a book. A film is not a stage play. A film is its own thing.
As a photographer many of my clients prefer shallow depth of field, this is my bread and butter. For that reason, I often experiment with deep focus compositions.. This video sums it up perfectly.
@@mezzb ha!! Yeah.. it's almost like shallow d.o.f because you can. !! There's definitely a culture of extreme gear lovers that doesn't always yield great creativity.
I don't think it's accurate at all to say that everything is always equally sharp in human vision. I don't know about your eyes but mine have to rack focus just like a camera. If i hold up my hand infront of my face and focus on it, the background/ enviroment around me becomes blurry just like a wide aperture lens. If I try hard enough I can even focus on my hand while shifting my eyes to look more directly at the background. so I think 1:30 is wrong.
I think in general I like deep focus a often notice the blur because I'm not a robot. I thought Infinity Pool was actually doing some interesting things with the blurring in soft focus and some films do use it artistically with thoughtful backgrounds that create a pleasant almost abstract framing for say a face, but in a lot of films it just feels lazy to me and distracting that so much of what is on screen is a blur.
You're definitely right that deep focus requires more light, better set design, etc. I think deep focus was also a feature of early films because they needed so much light to expose the film correctly anyway. IMO alot of films now actually lack a certain cinematic quality by keeping everything so soft. Part of what immerses you in a film is being able to sit in the scene and observe it, and frankly i don't think modern films give you that often enough. This super soft, wide open, 2x anamorphic style is obnoxious in my opinion. It's overly stylized to look cool but detracts from the immersion of the story. I understand this is also a function of massive budget restraints from studios (as is having everything handheld which is another topic) Would love to see more directors/DPs start utilizing deep focus again
That's what I thought. Too much perspective compression, IMHO, to be wide angle. You woul expect a lot more keystoning of the castle (appearing to be leaning backwards) if it was shot wide angle. Still, I appreciate wolfcrows points, even if his examples don't exactly line up with his lessons.
I find that deep focus works well for wide angle shots with characters that are far from the camera, like that 3 men in the rainy scene. But not when the scene is a medium close up of the actor. That's when deep focus is very distracting.
our eyes do blur the background if looking at something close and blur the forground when loking at something far away, just cannot be as shallow as a camera lense can
Your eyes do not see everything equally sharp. There is a ring of muscle around the lens which changes the focal length as necessary to sharpen the image at the centre of the retina at various distances. Everything seems in focus because your brain is constantly building and tweaking the model of the environment that the eye is contributing to the construction of.
I haven’t read all the comments here, so forgive me if I’m reiterating someone’s earlier thoughts. Stopping down is not the only way to achieve deep focus. By calculating hyperfocal distance for a camera and lens combination deep focus can be achieved at wide f stops. Stopping all the way down to sharpen everything will actually soften an image due to diffraction and lowers dynamic range as well. I’ve used this many times to shoot architectural photos where I needed to capture entire large spaces in focus without lots of artificial light. I can’t imagine the cinematographers of old didn’t apply this technique when they needed it. It’s super useful in landscape photography too.
That deepfocus shot with the woman, Sanjuro as the bandit(I keep forgetting the actor's name), and the other guy would make a really nice painting in my opinion
emmanuel lubezki also works with apertures like 5.6, 6.3 etc (even wider than that). btw this is a huge part of the look of his work on movies like "the revenant", "the three of live", "gravity".
Have you ever filmed closeups with a wide lens? still get very shallow depth of field. the distance to subject is just as much a thing as aperture. which is why in the old days they were still struggling with deep focus in their closeups.
1:15 "Everything is always equally sharp" - Wrong. Your eyes need to focus. They have a certain DOF. Try looking at your hand in front of you, then focus on the sky. Your hand will blur the same way a camera lens does. How can you know so much but get this wrong?
I'm a personal fan of deep focus cinematography. It's a challenge for sure, but j think the effects of it are pretty incredible. Like you said, everything has to be fined tuned more than shallow focus cinematography. Something that comes to mind though is direction. A director actually has to direct their actors. They have to actually go through blocking with actors and go through shots and scenes in a different manner than what you get with shallow focus films. I wish more people tried to do that. I wish more movies would be made where the frames are like paintings and movement of actors is essential and dynamic. So many movies are talking heads. Let actors act and directors direct.
Good video! I always find annoying when people say that something is "more cinematic" like what does that even mean? shallow depth of field is the cheapest and comfortable way to photograph a movie, look at the last zombie movie by zack snyder
Our eyes DO NOT see everything equally sharp. Just like a camera lens, our eyes also have a lens to focus and a pupil to act as the aperture. You can easily test this by bringing your hand close to your face and try focusing on your hand and on the background (especially in the evening where there is less light and our apertures are wide open, ie. our pupils are dilated).
1:13 hold on... that's not true! 🤨 Our eyes don't perceive an infinite depth of field. Hold a finger up in front of your face - when you focus your eyes on the finger, objects further behind go out of focus. Everything is not "always equally sharp", eyes have lenses too. I wonder how this odd observation happened. I think controlling and narrowing the DoF on film generally serves a more subjective, more narrative visual experience - the camera is functioning as an actor for a viewers eyes, mimicking the human focus and movement. This style may be a shortcut to having and audience think "cinematic". And I think deep focus may be used to make a viewer feel more like an observer of the scene, making them face the scene more personally, especially when combined with fewer cuts and static shots. A viewer is invited to be more aware of the reality of watching a scene with their own body - albeit from a comfy couch.
1:19 This is incorrect. The human eye has a very narrow center of focused image and the periphery is completely out of focus. It's our brains that fill in the blanks making us feel like everything is in focus. You can easily test this yourself by looking at a spot and focusing your attention on the peripheral image.
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Spielberg talked about this in an old interview. I'm not sure if he still does this, but he said he likes to use deep focus and wider angles than other directors because he feels a lot of movies over direct the viewer's eye. He prefers to have the audience feel like the director, if they want to wander around the frame, they're free to do so without bokeh or tight framing telling them they cant.
💯
I watched Jurassic Park recently and then watched some supplemental material related to the movie, and while watching this video I was thinking, y'know, I feel like Spielberg might do this because there were so many shots that really let the actors and scenes breathe. You never feel overly zoomed into the characters during dialogue.
Jurassic Park is a real treat to watch.
@@Selrisitai It really is. Jurassic Park just works on a level i can apreciate more and more every time i watch it.
I wasn't even a big fan when i was a kid back when it was released. And i'm not a Spielberg superfan.
But today i totally feel at ease with Jurassic Park just because it is crafted so well and everything is just working together like a clockwork.
It just is one of the perfect blockbusters.
Perfect explanation. In modern films, I find myself pausing the video and just looking at the framing, because they; the director and editor; are forcing me to look at certain things I don't wish to look at in the scene. My theory is, "Show me what's happening, and me the viewer, will decide what is worth paying attention too." Love Spielberg!
Actually only the greatest director use deep focus quite a lot. I'd even dare to say that most directors (because they aren't great at what they do) use a very shallow depth of field, Bokeh. Actually it is even understandable that when we use bokeh it's because we lack in other skills like: crystal clear motivated Blocking and frame composition. If you have a fast lense everybody can make a bokeh, which means no skill required. Yes it looks nice, but it has to be motivated.
As a professional in video/film, I'm confident that the shot at 0:24 used as an example of an 'easy wide angle' was actually a longer focal length - it was not a wide, you can tell by the compression (apparent distance foreground to background). The reason it's in focus is that the further away from the lens you're focusing, the larger the depth of field. Since the army, building and background are all far away from the camera, they all stay in focus.
I also reacted to that- it’s not a wide angle lens.
yeah, it's a wide shot but not a wide angle lens for sure
an easy aspect to overlook.....compression
What if its a crop of a wide angle shot? Hmmmmm
Kurosawa was also known for, especially later in his career, for utilizing longer lenses, filming from further away to give the actors more space and to create that larger look. High and Low is a great example of this before Ran and Kagemusha.
A funny historic annecdote: in Hitchcock's "Spellbound", his cinematographer refused to stop down because shallow depth of field was more pleasing for close ups. This was a problem because he wanted to do a POV with a gun in frame, pointed at Ingrid Bergman. Hitch's solution was to use a GIANT novelty hand and gun so it would be less out of focus 😅
CS ................the old man was on top of it !!!!!
Great story!
There is a scene in Suspiria by Dario Argento where they drink from a super large wine glass. If you’ve seen the movie then you know the shot. True masters at work $
That's bloody hilarious and brilliant
Besides painting, Kurosawa was also inspired by theatre, another medium where you can see everything on the stage (in frame) at the same time. His use of deep focus is one of the bigger contributors to crafting the theatrical feeling of his movies imho.
In photography, it's generally more challenging to compose well when everything is in focus and you can't rely on shallow dof to obscure distracting background elements. I imagine in cinematography that's also the case, probably more-so. But when it is pulled off well, it's hard to beat. It can add so much richness to a frame.
In cinema it is also a great tool that
1. helps to conseal some problems with the set.
2. allows to switch the attention of the viewer with the rack focus.
not to mention that shallow depth of field looks "pro" to many clients. hence smartphone manufacturers trying, (and failing, as of 23) to mimic this optical effect. I really enjoy the fact that that "pro" look came out of necessity originally, but shallow DOF does definitely work well for adding 3d "ness" undeniable.. And yes composing with deep focus is potentially infinitely more difficult.
Yes, that's the point, when done well, then it gives a lot to the whole end product. But "more challenging", so what? When you choose this profession and when you spend millions of dollars on a movie, your job is to overcome these challenges, and if you are a good director, or whatever, then you enjoy these challenges.
Probably easier in movies because you're following the subject.
@@fintonmainz7845 sure
Everything isn't always in focus for human eyes. If I hold a hand in front of my face, and stare at a wall behind it, my hand is blurry and out of focus. If I focus on my hand, it becomes sharp and the wall becomes blurry.
Yes, I was going to point this out too. I suspect that if everything was in focus all the time, our brains would be overloaded. The optics of the human eye aren't fundamentally much different to a glass lens. What 'IS' different is that it's attached to a very powerful brain. We actually 'see' with our brains. The brain interprets and assembles what our eye is taking in. So it assembles a scene as if all the parts are in focus and deletes some objects entirely that it deems unimportant. There are simple tests you can do to confirm this.
Great comment. I was about to write the same.
I agree, and it just makes me question the whole rest of the video, too. How did the narrator get everything so fundamentally wrong?
The film camera is not mimicking a person's vision.
Has nothing to do with the brain getting overloaded or needing glasses like some ppl are mentioning. Eyes cannot focus everything at once. Eyes are just lenses with sensors. It physically cannot focus everything at once. Look into light field cameras. They use a different way of sensing that collects more information about the incident light. This allows the changing of focus in image post processing.
Our brains do compensate for this and a lot of it is masked because what ever we are mentally focusing on we usually have our eyes optically focus on. If you consciously mentally focus on things not in the direct optical focus of you eyes you will realize they are not focus. You have to consciously not move your eyes to do this because subconscious your brain would just move your optical focus to the new subject of interest. This is a limitation of your eyes as an optical sensing device and not a limitation of your brains image processing. I suppose your brain could do some really fancy image processing and recover some focus for parts of your field of vision that are optically out of focus but that is unnecessary as our eyes can easily move and refocus. Its a waste of processing power but its not as if our brains could not feasibly do that if it was necessary. Assuming our brain had the same amount of processing power but we evolved with eyes that could not change focal length and could not easily change directions.
Deep focus presents an objective (observer) experience whereas shallow focus does a subjective experience. Deep focus doesn’t just imitate the traditional Japanese painting but also a live theater experience, which leave such freedom for the viewer to feel all the characters on stage and the tension between them.
Not just the Japanese theatre, but most theatre of the previous age for the time. One viewing a play in a Theatre only ever sees everything going on, including scene (set) and sometimes even costume changeovers. There is no guesswork for the patrons at an amiptheatre: the work of any live story, before fine art cinema, portends that the viewer is omniscient and respects the grounds on which that rests.
Yeah toshiro Mifune and Kurosawa focused on Kabuki theatre for their acting/direction of facial expressions and movements
@@sacredxgeometry I feel you're saying something that I want to hear. But the way you're saying it is confusing to me. Could you maybe restate it in simple, declarative sentences (?) What is the difference, as you understand it, between how people see things in a "theatre" . . . and how they see them in an "amphitheatre" (?) Thanks . . .
@@mental_time_travel oh no, there is no difference. There is however a difference between a live audience in the 20th century or before seeing everything that is intended, and the modern audience who has to tangle and fight with nuanced fine art cinema.
@@sacredxgeometry Okay, got it -- thanks. There's a British phrase that applies to such nuanced fine art cinema: "being too clever by half" . . .
Thank you for this. I’ve been trying to teach this with my students. That shallow depth isn’t necessarily cinematic. There is a time and place but deep focus has its time and place as well.
Teach them that Army of the Dead is all wrong about shallow depth of field!!!!!!!!!!!! The most awful shot of any Snyder movie!!
As a photographer, i like kurosawa because in every frame, I can tell what's going on even without dialogue. He can tell a story through visual alone. While DOP todays are mostly focus on the actor's face, you can't tell what's happening just by looking at someone's face.
But storytelling is not only about environmental context. Psychological context also matters. A close-up on the actors face with environment out of focus enables us to see what is going on the the minds of the characters.
@@jewulo if you only focus on their faces, you miss out on their movements, body language, how they interact with their surroundings. People can emote with their whole body, and Kurosawa movies are great examples of people acting with their whole body
@@Archontasil also Kurosawas movies are a great example of movies being more than just the actors... there's so much work that went into EVERY little detail in the set in the environment in the clothing in everything.... Actors are just part of the movie not THE movie
@@jewulo To separate the environment from the psychology is a mistake. Human beings interact with the environment and are affected by it. You could just have a close up of an actor's face being sad, but if coupled with a visual environmental effect such as rain the scene can be way more impactful. Or if you want to show a person being angry or sinister, using fire can really emphasize those emotions. Maybe using extreme winds to express urgency, or fast running water to show fear. Watch Kurosawa's movies with attention, you'll notice that he uses the actors' acting and the environment together to produce a really impactful scene. In fact, watch Dersu Uzala.
@@LoFiAxolotlyes, too much “look at the famous actor” and too little attention to the story
As a kid, I noticed Kurosawa's films have unique, epic quality about them, even if it's just two actors against a tree. Now I know it was deep focus. Shallow focus looks cozy and intimate, deep focus looks grandiose and operatic.
Thanks for the video. For me, super shallow depth of field is truly "The TH-cam Look," as opposed to being cinematic :(
I appreciate you bringing up this other story telling tool of deep focus. We get locked into the shallow look, but deep focus has it's place too. The scenes you showed were incredible.
You’re thinking more with digital imagers in mind. Film cameras are pretty fixed to 1/48th of a second at 24 fps. Film stocks in those classic Kurosawa films were between 50-100 iso range. At 50 iso, in broad daylight, you’re stopped all the way down to get exposure. Make it worse, they’d use reflectors to brighten the actors faces. So you’re at f11 easily all the time, maybe F16. Unless you had filtration, you’d always have a very flat image, more akin to smaller gauges like 16mm.
The reason why so many classic films shot this way is only because it was way easier to focus. They didn’t have silent reflex cameras until the 70s. Even then, it took a long time before the viewfinders were bright enough to nail focus when a lens is wide open.
So yes, the main reason why people in the past shot more flat is 100% technical and has little to do with choice.
Thank you. I see it all the time that young TH-cam content creators tend to have retcon answers to historical problems without any practical experience
The reason for digital making such rapid progress was almost wholly economic. Film production and post-production ate up serious portions of a film's budget. That film did certain things well, and digital does certain things better, is known. 70mm film stocks meant shallower DOF at same angle view because of inherently longer focal lengths, and more tele compression, too. Conversely there are ever-smaller digital sensors with excellent IQ. f/2 starts to look like f/22 of old. Better get used to deep focus
True, but even nowadays using deep focus is actually quite neat. It's a pitty so little tend to use it. I love deep focus shots. Terrence Malick is someone who loves deep focus in most of his movies.
@@Leprutz I think people believe it’s cheap looking. It’s super easy to stop down and get everything in focus. It’s hard to get things in focus with a more shallow depth of field. The majority of big budget films strive for a more shallow depth of field look because it’s more cinematic in many ways.
@@NarrowGaugeFilmsLLC sorry but again. Wrong. Cinematic is not about how the shot looks.
Cinematic is how you tell your story through those shots that you meticulosly compose.
Shallow depth of fiel is in no way easyier than deep focus. Deep focus looks only cheap when the storyteller doesn't know shit about composition.
Shallow depth of field can also be cheap if overused. In fact the series Euporia is in my opinion a horrible looking show. Everything is way too blurry. It is all but cinematic.
But hey it's my opinion.
Our eyes don't always have everything in focus at once, but when we concentrate on different parts of a scene, our eyes shift focus on them. Try looking at your finger, then quickly shift to a distant object, and you will notice your focus shifting.
seems pretty obvious. i stopped the video after he made this pretty obtuse claim
There are a lot of false claims in this video. He says shorter focal length lenses have higher depth of field. That's just objectively false.
are we talking about 1:15 ? because he's not saying "everything is always equally sharp" as seen through our eyes or a camera... he's saying things as independent objects (with no observer) are always equally sharp, which is obviously true. it's our focus that makes things blurry.
our eyes never have everything in focus at once
@@Zacryptocerus it's functionally true though - the same f stop on a wider lens will achieve a deeper field of focus than a long lens, especially at closer distances.
Very instructive.
Kurosawa’s way of working was certainly that he drew sketchbooks with clear intent and easthetic, that’s the movie. How it has to be shot is a technical issue only.
Interesting video and great topic.
The only thing I would disagree is calling the shot at 0:25 a wide angle shot/lens. It’s clearly shot with a longer lens, at least 50mm and possibly more. The compression of the image gives it away.
Even the Rashomon shots at the temple are barely wide angle. Kurosawa barely used wide lenses as opposed to Welles who used wide lenses a lot.
Also achieving deep focus outside during daylight is the easiest thing ever. You just close the aperture and move away as much as needed. Inside and during night is of course a completely different challenge.
I remember you discussing deep focus in your earlier video, covering Jean Renoir's masterpiece, "Rules of the Game", and I am glad to hear you telling us more about it here. Thank you! 👍
Good call! You’re welcome.
It seems the business side of film often interferes with the creative process when your budget is limited. It's like hard decisions must be made because time is money. That's probably the case with most inexperienced film makers. I really appreciate your work.
Again, I think it is just laziness, and the easiest way to make something """more cinematic""" is the overuse of shallow depth of field. To me it is very annoying, when even distant scenes have SDoF, it bothers my eyes that not everyting is in focus. Same example as always, the 90s did a great job on this part, distant scenes had deep focues, everything was sharp, but many times even mid shots were full sharp, while close ups had nice shallow depth of field. You can find this in almost every 90s blockbuster. Since the digital camera era, people try to reinvent the wheel, and spend tons of time on making their shots look like a 90s movie, still fails tho, because the result is usually an overcolorgraded two tone dark something with tons of shallow depth of field.
Well said
Stanley Kubrick was a master of his craft and very rarely used a shallow depth of field. The lenses he used had loads of character because of their faults which gave his films a unique look.
Excellent analysis
Maybe you to lazy to appreciate art.
Though we have greater latitude and more colour information so it's a bit of a renaissance if you will it probably will calm down. We can do more so we will, it is in our nature. Also we have larger sensors for more control and tech that can help us achieve shots that would have only been dreamt of in the 90s. I wouldn't look at what we do now with so much disdain tbh. But that's my 2c
I think it's also important to look at the context of a scene like the rain, and the fight you were talking about. All of those elements need to be in focus for a scene like that to keep the narrative throughline. With the rain it's an oppressive natural phenomena dulling the senses and emotions of the characters, so it becomes part of the scene and therefore the shot. With the fight each character's focus and eye line is important to maintain the tension of the scene and show that at no point is any one of them losing focus on what they want, or showing weakness or distraction for even a moment. Sure there's personal and artistic choices that go into a scene holding deep focus in that way, but there's also reasons that serve the film, the scene, and the characters.
Fr, this mdfk trying to tell us is just a personal choice by the great Akira, like he never thought about what you are saying. He is well known for out-of-this-world scene blocking
Personally I really dislike shallow depth of field. Once I noticed it, I couldn't stop seeing it. So now any time I see deep focus I feel a great sense of relief
Regarding the scene at 6:27. It's just a conjecture - but perhaps Kurosawa fought for deep focus in that scene, because the film is ABOUT the three, diverging narratives of the same event (the 'Rashamon effect'), so showing the three faccial expressinons just when the violence is about happen has a meaning in relation to the concept of the movie.
My two cents...keep it up man, just discovered your channel and I LOVE it!
deep focus is fucking sexy. people should use it more. it is a powerful tool that gets ignored, forgotten or overlooked by many.
That and long takes, which go together really well.
I would think it's telling a very different story, depending on whether three characters are seen separately or in one shot. Showing them in seperate images focuses on the characters' individuality while seeing all three together not only shapes a triangle (which most people connect with tension) but it also focuses the attention on the relationship of the characters instead of their individual existence.
Using a shallow depth of field for every shot just shouts to me "I don't want to block". It's fine if you want to focus on the performances but if your movie is just a bunch of floating heads and there's no relation to the geographical space other than your obligatory wide shot your film professor told you to shoot at the beginning of the scene then you shouldn't be directing movies. There is just so much you're missing out on if you only decide to shoot on lower apertures (looking at you Zack Snyder). The space your characters live in is incredibly important and treating master shots as "oh it's the wide shot I have to shoot at the beginning" limits the amount of visual storytelling. The worst part is that blocking requires no money, you just have to sit down and think about it for a minute. Filmmakers who refuse to even think about doing anything else than shot-reverse-shot are lazy and if they're so in love with focusing on only the performances of how characters spell out dialogue then they should go into radio dramas, not cinema.
Deep focus is generally better, leads to more interesting compositions and allows our eyes to explore the frame
Kubrick and Kurosawa both used long lenses with deep focus to compress and flatten the FOV.
Though both directors had exceptions to this, they often used this technique to present the action as if viewed from an omnipotent, impartial, god-like perspective.
Also if your last name doesn't begin with a K you can't become a legendary filmmaker.
Than I'll change my name from Dan to Kan.
"omnipotent, impartial, god-like perspective" - For that see Miklos Jancso's "The Red and the White" 1967. Also to lesser extent in Malick's "Badlands" (1973).
This video rocks dude. I've never heard anyone explain something this technical and complicated in a way that makes me - a total amateur - feel like i completely understand that aspect including how the technology of all this influences the choices that are made.
One of my favorite movies, Michael Mann's Miami Vice film adaptation, does this a lot but cranks the shutter speed to a gazillion so the scenes at night don't need to be lit at all, and the entire movie is shot on location so the entire movie are these beautifully composed, super dark but colorful, dream-like images, and I feel like I finally understand how Michael Mann accomplished this.
Shallow depth of field should be used not just as a "cinematic style" but in the film's visual language. You're taking away information, the world loses it's sharpness. This could be when the character you're portraying is in a mental state where he or she is disconnected from the world around them, in deep thoughts, deeply in love, depressed etc. As a director you are constantly thinking of how to tell the story to the audience as effectively as possible and the choice of DoF should be part of that. It is definitely very annoying that directors overuse SDoF even if it doesn't serves the narrative, and it is often even disrespectful to the viewer that you leave them no choice to look at the thing you exactly point out to them. It's like a huge red arrow pointing to a face screaming "this is important, forget the rest!"... if a director blocks correctly and has the lights properly set up you don't need to cheapen the shots like this. Same goes with just making everything deep focus because it's hard to do... if it doesn't drive the narrative then it's not always the right choice (as Wolfcrow also pointed out with the rain in the background).
IMO shallow focus is cheap. It's a typical giveaway of a cheap production: tight shoots and shallow focus. Where as wide shoots and deep focus is hard. Not so much from a technical side, but you have to control so much of your background and have so much understanding of composition and you may need we more takes to get the shoot you want.
One of my favorite films using deep focus is Harry Potter Prisoner of Azkaban. Mainly due to the use of wide lenses, there’s barely any “bokeh” effect on the background.
I’ll have to rewatch that movie! It’ll be interesting to see that effect
You miss out on one other aspect--- when a film is projected in a cinema, it is GIGANTIC, and modern shallow focus looks ridiculous. Deep focus creates a reasonably interesting view, as people's eyes wander over the enormous screen. This experience is hard to replicate even with large home flatscreen televisions, but if you are actually in a cinema, a Welles film, or a Kurasawa film, is just infinitely more INTERESTING to see than anyone else's films.
I watched some movies in IMAX and the shallow focus was made re annoying than usual.
The irony of what you've talked about is that Kurosawa was using a lot of long lenses, just from super far away. That's why they're so dynamic yet so flat, it's zoomed in from aaggeesss away. To me it makes it even more impressive though
I appreciate the subtle nod to "Every Frame a Painting" at 7:25. Nice to see analysis of cinema with the same degree of interest.
Check out hyper focal guides! Hyper focus, a development attributed to Ansel Adams, and used for Citizen Kane, uses math to encapsulate the entire image into the circle of confusion (area of focus basically). Because light gets fairly distorted (defraction) around f/16 - f/22, it's not simply a matter of stopping down to increase your depth of field. There is a hyper focal length based upon the frame size, the focal length, and the aperture that will capture the entire image perfectly in focus without any defraction, which much, much more detail than if you had your image set to an f/16 on a 12mm lens. For example, if you want to shoot the movie on 35mm film, around an f/8, on a 50mm lens, you would need to set the focal length to 35 feet. But only around 8 feet for a 25mm lens.
I see Kagemusha in the thumbnail, I watch.
Also, Ran is a masterpiece
Our eyes are definitely not always seeing these sharp. if you look at something close, things far away will be out of focus
Shallow depth of field was the norm a long time ago. I can't help thinking it was mainly because the film was slow, necessitating wider f stops to achieve exposure. If you watch older movies, such as Casablanca, there is rarely any fore and aft movement of actors; they tend to keep a constant distance between themselves and the camera (otherwise they would either go out of focus, or require the camera operator to track them by moving the plane of focus in compensation). Welles liked depth of field; maybe that was one reason he tended to use wide angle lenses, since it's easier to maintain depth of field when using the shorter focal lengths. Kurosawa wanted depth and tended to prefer longer focal lengths, and I think I remember seeing a remark from one of his staff about that requiring more light, more artificial light, in order to maintain exposure. The examples given lump together several Kurosawa films, but perhaps one should remember that Rashomon was shot by Miyagawa, whereas The Seven Samurai and Ran were shot by Nakai.
I like this, and the intelligence, the close observation, and carefully considered analyses of other Wolfcrow videos. I do think though that in _Rashomon_ there is a cinematic justification for the frequent deep focus, quite apart from Kurosawa's background and worldview. The background sets, with their sharpness and oddity need to be seen because they buttress the pointedness and oddity of the story in addition to a point made below about it allowing us to discern better the relationship between the characters. Even the rain needs to be sharply discerned as it seems almost to pierce the characters. Here, cinematic technique strengthens the flow and structure of the entire narrative. Shallow focus would have diminished the whole thing to the point of psychological blandness and narrative weakness. One cannot show otherwise simply by isolating a particular shot, putting the background out of focus, then innocently asking what harm would have been done. For a still photograph, none perhaps, but it would have wrecked the film. Besides, we do not see individual shots in grand isolation. Rather, each adds to an entire context, which in turn proves the meaning of the whole. We must remember also that motion in cinema changes the psychology at play. We simply cannot analyse film as we would analyse still photography.
It is not about focal length (wide angle or telephoto) but about the aperture and what is the distance to the closest object you are photographing. Fo some reason cinematographers and photographers do not care to learn how to analyze one simple formula of lens optics: 1/x+1/y=1/f.
We've gone full circle from deep focus in scenes that don't need it, to know people shooting like f/1.2 in scenes that absolutely need more DOF...
Some of those shots 😍 The wide shot of the swordsman in the open courtyard… the armies with flags in front of the castle… like paintings come to life.
I am surprised you didn't mention hyperfocus at all. As this was and is utilised a lot. Maybe your not aware yourself though, which is also fine. For anyone interested a hyper focal length is the distance from any giving lens where you have infinity focus. This would be harder to use with teles though but did noticed you were on anamorphic lenses so gives a proportionally wider fov. I would have also suggested a different camera for your short. Crazy to say but maybe even an a7s you might want to curl your nose at this, as it is not raw or a true cinema camera and anamorphic would have been hard though you would have had insane lowlight 10 bit 422 prores which should give plenty of information. There are other cameras too that would have yielded a much better low light performance from Sony or canon the c700 to think of one. But this is never the only reason to choose a camera. Any way great video and very insightful
I am a photographer, not a cinematographer or director, but this is still important to my craft. Composition and DOF - bokeh -is becoming more and more overlooked with the modern camera, but the emphasis you out on why and when here is important IMO. Thank you and hope many people pay attention.
Bokeh as it is called now was once considered a fault. What was once a gradually defocused background now has to have a sharp cut off and paper thin DoF ;)
I personally prefer using a split-focus diopter. I find a good middle ground between deep focus and a more shallow depth of field. Robert Wise and Richard Kline together used it a lot in their careers. So does Brian De Palma. Kurosawa used a lot of telephoto which I've never been a huge fan of (other than in High and Low... which is my personal favorite film he's made). Welles ended up using a lot of wide-angle lenses in his later career (Touch of Evil and Falstaff are two prime examples). Telephoto flatten an image too much for my liking, though there are certainly numbers of example where it works masterfully.
Yes!
Quality content. Keep up the good job. Subscribed!
Knock at the cabin used wayyyy to much swallow field to the point of annoyance
That wide shot from Ran with the building burning is NOT with a wide angle lens. It's with a longer lens as you can tell by the compression of the frame between the soldiers and the building.
Didn't realize that about Akira Kurosawa's movies, but hearing it here it does make sense. That's really cool.
I think it's not that forgotten, more people would do it but they dont have an art department, good locations, or high output lights necessary to make most situations look good
The shot in Ran clearly isn’t a wide. He was known for using long lenses from a distance to o create compression in the frame.
A smaller sensor (C4K) will produce a deeper DoF than 35mm film stock with the same angle of view. Image circle diameter.
Shutter speed can be made faster than the frame rate but not slower. Yes it is usually half the frame rate or 180°
ISO 6400 is generally onset of noise but you may notice reduced dynamic range. Signal to noise ratio, it depends on how the camera handles that.
Digital movie can sometimes run 2 stops slower than stills require.
Diffraction depends on the lens and its aperture leaves. A good lens doesn't generally diffract until approaching f/16 and then you'd have to look for it. It can be used for effect. I don't know why some videographers like some pretty dire lenses for their character and look.
Not everything in our field on view is sharp, only the things we focus at. The blurriness outside of what we focus on only become apparent when looking at something close to your eyes. Just like an aperture, our pupil decides the amount of blur - If it's very bright (like outside in the sun) the amount of blur behind the focused object is less because your pupil is contricted. It's hard to observe directly, but just like you can notice things in your periphery, you can definitely "see" the blur. Try it out. Put your fingers close to your eyes, focus, notice the blur in the background. Try it in a darker room and then out in the sun. The focus shift usually also is faster when it's bright.
It's pretty cool, our eyes function very similar to a camera lens - Stereotypic 3D organic camera lenses. Trying to look when it's dark outside, you can even notice how the darker there is, the more noise there is, and colors are harder to make out - just like ISO on a camera.
Enjoy!
I love deep focus. The shallow focus we see in this era makes me feel like I need to get glasses
Shallow depth of field is over used due to the popularity of large sensor cameras. If you want do get deep focus with a modern camera M43rds its a good choice.
One simple rule : if you have a living element or a moving element that's important for the premise of the story, you got to use deep focus.
Eg. : If a character is stranded in a desert, you got to show the scale and that's only possible via deep focus. And maybe, if you're shooting a war movie, you might wanna set the offensive atmosphere for the protagonist(s) like Stanley Kubrick did in Full Metal Jacket by not using shallow depth of field but actually giving out the atmospheric details to the viewers and how hostile it would have been for the characters.
IMO, in the movie Joker, the element of focus was the protagonist who's delusional and kind of self-centred and so, it was absolutely necessary to convey it through the visuals.
Movies of the 30's, 40's, & 50's had a tendency to be sharply focused. In the 60's, extreme shallow focus became more popular.
By extreme is the focal plane is focused on a very narrow band, like a newspaper while the person's face reading it is blurred, and some object in front of the paper also out of focused. Part of the idea of shallow focus is to create the feeling of normal 3d, like when you eyes focus on a subject, and what is in front what is behind is not focused upon.
I personally like deep focus, though shallow focus can be useful and very effective. However the worst Shallow focus shot I ever saw was an extreme shallow focus shot in a 3D movie. The shot was of three people standing near each other, staggered. Though they at most were three feet apart in distance from the camera. only the middle person was in sharp, detailed focus. The fore ground and background characters were blurry. I actually got a headache as I kept trying to focus on the other two in the shot.
The shot at the beginning from Ran is no wideangle shot. But great Video anyway!
the easiest way to get deeper focus is to use a smaller sensor, which is how eyes and phone cameras get such deep focus, the iris is not big enough to create significant depth of field
Love the nod to f.22. An honorable mention would be Christopher Nolans' use of the iMax camera in The Dark Knight; a modern popular movie that used shallow depth of field to no end and seemed to have sparked other high profile action directors and Hollywood producers to approve of this, otherwise, low-budget style, for more expensive productions.
Where can I find this beautiful landscapes from 1:30 ?
1:13 What are you even talking about? our eyes do blur things that are out of focuse distance-wise the exact same way a camera lens does.
This might sound silly but I love the way they handle this stuff in The Vampire Diaries. There’s a really nice mix.
Fully agree. I am not a professional photographer, but I am an avid cyclist in Switzerland. Often I want a picture with my bike in the foreground and a mountain range in the background. Here compression is important, which means stand at a significant distance from the foreground object and zoom in to get the background in focus and also appropriately large, to become an equal element of the picture.
would be interested in deep focus film after newer small sensor cinema camera released, we could have large aperture while still keeping things in focus.
Interesting video. I've wondered why people keep on going on about bokeh being cinematic when most of the examples I can think of have deep focus. One other thing. Do you remember that strange effect in some older movies where they cheated getting deep focus. For example in star trek the motion picture. You have say, spock speaking to captain kirk and spock would be in focus in the background and the back of kirks head would be in focus in the foreground but there would be this cut around the foreground subject where there should be blur. Its hard to explain but its like having two shots stuck together. These shots would always be stationary. P.s. Just remembered, you can also see this in close encounters of the third kind a lot too.
It's a little too complex of a subject for the explanation. Deep depth of field requires a small aperture, and therefore tons of very strong light. The human eye doesn't focus on everything. It focuses on a small bullseye of what it sees. Hence, a shallow depth of field with blurry background is favored to recreate what the mind experiences. New post-production digital techniques will allow for blurring areas of the frame that are in perfect focus too. I'd disagree that deep focus is preferred to shallow focus. A technique that allows the eye to bounce around the screen as if a movie were a stage play on the screen might favor deep focus, but for storytelling, shallow depth of field is preferred, with numerous tight shots and camera angles. A film is not a book. A film is not a stage play. A film is its own thing.
As a photographer many of my clients prefer shallow depth of field, this is my bread and butter. For that reason, I often experiment with deep focus compositions.. This video sums it up perfectly.
@@mezzb ha!! Yeah.. it's almost like shallow d.o.f because you can. !! There's definitely a culture of extreme gear lovers that doesn't always yield great creativity.
I generally prefer f5.6-f8 when I have light. Regardless of the focal length
I don't think it's accurate at all to say that everything is always equally sharp in human vision. I don't know about your eyes but mine have to rack focus just like a camera.
If i hold up my hand infront of my face and focus on it, the background/ enviroment around me becomes blurry just like a wide aperture lens.
If I try hard enough I can even focus on my hand while shifting my eyes to look more directly at the background.
so I think 1:30 is wrong.
I think in general I like deep focus a often notice the blur because I'm not a robot. I thought Infinity Pool was actually doing some interesting things with the blurring in soft focus and some films do use it artistically with thoughtful backgrounds that create a pleasant almost abstract framing for say a face, but in a lot of films it just feels lazy to me and distracting that so much of what is on screen is a blur.
Always a great video with good content. Straight and to the point. Thanks for sharing.
You're definitely right that deep focus requires more light, better set design, etc. I think deep focus was also a feature of early films because they needed so much light to expose the film correctly anyway.
IMO alot of films now actually lack a certain cinematic quality by keeping everything so soft. Part of what immerses you in a film is being able to sit in the scene and observe it, and frankly i don't think modern films give you that often enough. This super soft, wide open, 2x anamorphic style is obnoxious in my opinion. It's overly stylized to look cool but detracts from the immersion of the story. I understand this is also a function of massive budget restraints from studios (as is having everything handheld which is another topic)
Would love to see more directors/DPs start utilizing deep focus again
Don't forget the use of the old split diopter filter. If I'm not wrong Orson Welles used on the example you used here
0:26 Thats not shot on a wide angle lens
That's what I thought. Too much perspective compression, IMHO, to be wide angle. You woul expect a lot more keystoning of the castle (appearing to be leaning backwards) if it was shot wide angle. Still, I appreciate wolfcrows points, even if his examples don't exactly line up with his lessons.
so what mm do you think?... and what is a wide angle in mm's?.. anything less than 50mm?... or 35mm?... (for academy gate etc)
@@erlstone I think it was shot on 85mm or above. A wide angle lens is everything under 35mm
I find that deep focus works well for wide angle shots with characters that are far from the camera, like that 3 men in the rainy scene. But not when the scene is a medium close up of the actor. That's when deep focus is very distracting.
I was stunned by the deep focus cinematography in "Plot against America"
our eyes do blur the background if looking at something close and blur the forground when loking at something far away, just cannot be as shallow as a camera lense can
Your eyes do not see everything equally sharp. There is a ring of muscle around the lens which changes the focal length as necessary to sharpen the image at the centre of the retina at various distances. Everything seems in focus because your brain is constantly building and tweaking the model of the environment that the eye is contributing to the construction of.
I haven’t read all the comments here, so forgive me if I’m reiterating someone’s earlier thoughts. Stopping down is not the only way to achieve deep focus. By calculating hyperfocal distance for a camera and lens combination deep focus can be achieved at wide f stops. Stopping all the way down to sharpen everything will actually soften an image due to diffraction and lowers dynamic range as well. I’ve used this many times to shoot architectural photos where I needed to capture entire large spaces in focus without lots of artificial light. I can’t imagine the cinematographers of old didn’t apply this technique when they needed it. It’s super useful in landscape photography too.
That deepfocus shot with the woman, Sanjuro as the bandit(I keep forgetting the actor's name), and the other guy would make a really nice painting in my opinion
emmanuel lubezki also works with apertures like 5.6, 6.3 etc (even wider than that). btw this is a huge part of the look of his work on movies like "the revenant", "the three of live", "gravity".
Have you ever filmed closeups with a wide lens? still get very shallow depth of field. the distance to subject is just as much a thing as aperture. which is why in the old days they were still struggling with deep focus in their closeups.
Perspective Field Compression and Depth of Field in Deep Focus, Creates the Sense of Space & Time.
1:15 "Everything is always equally sharp" - Wrong. Your eyes need to focus. They have a certain DOF. Try looking at your hand in front of you, then focus on the sky. Your hand will blur the same way a camera lens does. How can you know so much but get this wrong?
I'm a personal fan of deep focus cinematography. It's a challenge for sure, but j think the effects of it are pretty incredible. Like you said, everything has to be fined tuned more than shallow focus cinematography. Something that comes to mind though is direction. A director actually has to direct their actors. They have to actually go through blocking with actors and go through shots and scenes in a different manner than what you get with shallow focus films.
I wish more people tried to do that. I wish more movies would be made where the frames are like paintings and movement of actors is essential and dynamic. So many movies are talking heads. Let actors act and directors direct.
Good video! I always find annoying when people say that something is "more cinematic" like what does that even mean? shallow depth of field is the cheapest and comfortable way to photograph a movie, look at the last zombie movie by zack snyder
@1.16 Why the drone footage of Wanstead Station and The George pub from London?
Our eyes don't see everything in focus, we have a depf of field, look at your finger and everything behind will be out of focus
in photography ive only heard of this referred to as hyperfocal dof. never heard this term before. thanks
On a full frame camera changing to crop mode such as super 35 or super 16 will create perception of deeper focus - or use a phone camera 😅
Our eyes DO NOT see everything equally sharp. Just like a camera lens, our eyes also have a lens to focus and a pupil to act as the aperture. You can easily test this by bringing your hand close to your face and try focusing on your hand and on the background (especially in the evening where there is less light and our apertures are wide open, ie. our pupils are dilated).
1:13 hold on... that's not true! 🤨 Our eyes don't perceive an infinite depth of field. Hold a finger up in front of your face - when you focus your eyes on the finger, objects further behind go out of focus. Everything is not "always equally sharp", eyes have lenses too. I wonder how this odd observation happened.
I think controlling and narrowing the DoF on film generally serves a more subjective, more narrative visual experience - the camera is functioning as an actor for a viewers eyes, mimicking the human focus and movement. This style may be a shortcut to having and audience think "cinematic". And I think deep focus may be used to make a viewer feel more like an observer of the scene, making them face the scene more personally, especially when combined with fewer cuts and static shots. A viewer is invited to be more aware of the reality of watching a scene with their own body - albeit from a comfy couch.
0:27 that is most definitely not a wide angle lens. That is a wide shot taken with a very far telephoto lens.
A very interesting subject that i'd not previously contemplated. Cheers for the upload.
Bravo. Excellent exposition.
Thank you
Always had that question in mind. Thanks.
1:19 This is incorrect. The human eye has a very narrow center of focused image and the periphery is completely out of focus. It's our brains that fill in the blanks making us feel like everything is in focus. You can easily test this yourself by looking at a spot and focusing your attention on the peripheral image.
I learned a lot from this. Thanks.
👏👏👏👏👏👏 no words for deep focus explanations