Try out the main lenses you will be using right before shooting actually begins and set a similar F/Stop for all of them. By shooting a little test footage from each of the lenses you intend to use and setting up a similar aperture, you’re more likely to get similar colors and exposures to background elements. On “The Message” shoot, we paid so much attention to the look of our subject that we mixed aperture settings and had very disparate backgrounds. This essentially meant that we either had to rotoscope our backgrounds or scrap shots. In the end, we had to scrap some awesome shots because the time just wasn’t in place to do as much rotoscoping as would have been needed.
8.
For the most part, shoot with prime lenses. Prime lenses are fixed lenses with a static central focal point, as opposed to “zoom” lenses, which can have their focal distance radically changed. Zoom lenses are very popular on SLR and DSLR cameras, because you can go from a 55mm to 200mm focal distance with a single wrist rotation. However, these zoom lenses aren’t capable of opening their apertures as wide as prime lenses are and they tend to have noticeable movement of their elements when you’re recording video. We used Nikon lenses when we shot The Message, as some of us on the crew are still photographers who really like Nikon lenses. (For filmmakers who haven’t decided what type of lenses to use, Nikons can usually be purchased relatively cheaply online, because they’ve kept the same sort of lens mount for so many decades and there are simply so many of them out there.)
9.
Try to get as “fast” a prime lens as possible. The wider the maximum aperture on a prime lens, the faster the lens and the better it is for recording motion video. (Remember that wider apertures are smaller numbers, so an f 1.4 is faster than an f 3.6 and far faster than an f 11.)
10.
For a good starter selection of lenses, try to have a 28mm, a 50mm, and an 85mm lens. 28mm’s are often used for establishing shots, as these are wide angle lenses that show more of the surrounding area than the human eye can normally perceive. 50mm lenses are designed to most closely resemble what the human eye perceives, so these are often used for most of the “meat and potatoes” shots of films. Telephoto lenses like the 85mm are designed to compress space between things and are very useful for dialogue scenes, as common shooting setups cut between OTS (Over The Shoulder) reversals and insert close-ups.
(Uncorrected Image: 200mm Nikkor Prime lens on left; 50mm Prime Nikkor Lens on right) Although the complexion of th emain actress looks similar between the two shots above, the radical difference of the 200mm lens changes the look of the background drastically.
11.
Avoid super wide lenses or ultra high telephoto lenses unless you’re going for a very stylized look. Super wide lenses, like 20mm and below, are known as ‘fisheye’ lenses and cause spherical warping of the image. While these are popular for music videos and security camera shots, they’re not regularly used in other areas. Extreme telephoto lenses, like 120mm lenses and above, tend to compress things so much and create such a shallow depth of field that they can be hard to work with. On The Message, we used a 200mm lens on some of our close up shots, but found the look so disparate from the other footage we had that we ended up not using them. (Additionally, we hadn’t set our aperture up similarly enough between the telephoto to our other lenses so that, when combined with the cloudy day, the footage looked more like it took place in heaven rather than on earth.)
12.
Make sure you have a very stable tripod. The setup of most lens adapter kits on an SD or HD camera is going to run you about 12 to 16 pounds. That’s a huge difference from the average weight of 3.5 – 5.5 pounds that many SD/HD cameras come in at ‘naked’, so you’ll want to keep your camera very stable.
13.
If your lens adapter doesn’t automatically flip the footage it records, consider buying a prism attachment. When we shot The Message with the Redrock M2, the microX image flip attachment wasn’t available. As such, all the footage had to be flipped in post, which was a lot more time consuming that we had realized at first. Now that we have the microX and have been able to use it for awhile, there’s no way I would go back to shooting on the M2 without it. (Obviously, if you don’t have the extra $385 cash for it, using the M2 without it will still give you a great image, but, if you can swing it, it’ll save a lot of time.
