From the course: Creating a Short Film: 07 Cinematography
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Achieving critical focus
From the course: Creating a Short Film: 07 Cinematography
Achieving critical focus
- Achieving critical focus is the process of getting your subject in focus. This is critical, because it's something you can't fix later. If a shot is too dark, or a little too light, there are some remedies for that in post-production. But if a shot is out of focus, there's not much you can do to fix it. These shots from the night scene didn't turn out very sharp. Because we were shooting at night, with a small crew, I had to open up the aperture all the way on prime lenses, in order to get a good exposure. But that made my depth of field really shallow. As we'll look at in the next chapter, this means that only a small sliver of the frame is in focus. As our talent moved around, she went in and out of focus. Now I was operating the camera by myself, and didn't have a camera assistant to adjust the focus, so I blew it. As we've discussed, it's the job of the first assistant camera person to adjust the focus, or in film lingo to pull focus. Pulling focus is the act of dynamically…
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