You CAN tell your story with Depth of Field?!
Cameras are this interesting tool that directors either know a lot about or find terrifying!
No matter the type of director you are, when it comes to understanding the tools you can use as a director, it’s best to get acquainted with the camera.
Before Film, I started out as a photographer, I took pictures of pretty much everything and it taught me how to use a camera, but not so much how to capture a story in a MOVING IMAGE. So when I started to make videos I would quite often commit one of the worst sins in film — choosing images and angles based on how cool they looked. You may have seen films in which you couldn’t fault how it looked, but it left you feeling empty or that you had wasted your time.
A pretty image does not make a great film!
It wasn’t until later in my career that I came to understand how incredibly powerful each aspect of the camera was in manipulating the way the audience would feel as they watched my film.
The first thing I decided to learn — you’ve probably heard of it and most likely used it subconsciously already — is ‘depth of field’. As commonplace understanding goes, the shallower the depth of field, the more cinematic your shot will look.
Generally, this is correct. The shallower your depth of field, the more you will separate your subject from its background and foreground. In turn, this helps to direct the audience’s focus to where you want it to be.
However, depth of field can be used in a multitude of ways. For instance, let’s say we have a character who’s very emotional at a particular point in your film. They’re on the verge of crying because of a traumatic event. So we, as the director, decide to do a close-up right on their eyes so we can see the emotion. While doing this, we have three options: use an incredibly shallow depth of field, a medium depth of field, or a very deep depth of field.
Each of the images makes the audience feel differently about the character. By shifting the background and foreground out of focus (shallow depth of field), our eyes are drawn to the character, yet by doing so, we also make the character feel separate from their surroundings. They seem more internal; they’re introspective and pensive.
So if a shallow depth of field piques our interest as to what the character is thinking, the medium depth of field, however, starts the connect the character more to their surroundings. This means they could be listening to someone else intently or reacting to events around them.
The widest depth of field is a bit different. This is where we bring the majority of the space around the character into focus, which leads us to understand that this character is aware of the environment around them — this is especially useful in action films where the character is acutely aware of their surroundings, they could also be moving quickly making shallow focus all but impossible.
No matter which option you choose, remember that your depth of field can really affect the way in which your audience will feel when watching your story.
Writers: Robert & Lesley-Anne Macfarlane
