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Question about using focal length.

H

harmonica44

I watched this video from film riot, on what types of shots to use and when to use them. I already new all the types of shots pretty much from my own planning, but there is one I have never heard of till now. Focal length.

In the video it's 5:25 in:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYPrtXZ7HVE

I didn't notice that you can make the background move closer or further away from the actor physically. I thought zoom just made the background look like it was the same distance, whatever focal length. I didn't notice that you can actually push the background further away or bring it closer, but I guess now that I think about it, of course you can.

What are some movies that use this technique of bringing it in closer or further back than normal though? How do I tell when watching a movie, how far in the lens is zoomed, or is it impossible to tell. I've been trying but no luck so far.
 
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A) If you're zooming in, the lens magnifies the image it's capturing.
B) If you've doubled the magnification of the lens, a subject 10' from the camera seems to be 5' from the camera.
C) If you've doubled the magnification of the lens, a subject 20' from the camera seems to be 10' from the camera.
D) The relationship has now shifted from B and C appearing 10' feet apart to appearing 5' apart... they are now closer together.

These are the basic physics behind focal length.
 
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It's not just for making the background appear closer or farther away. It also works to making your actors (in a two-shot) appear closer together or farther apart. Which can come in handy two-fold:

1) You're trying to cheat your set-up and make it seem like the actors are sitting/standing in the same place when actually you had to move them around to get the shot you need.

2)The emotional aspect. Do you want the audience to feel that the two characters are very intimate? Or do you want it to feel like there is a great emotional distance/barrier between them? It's just one example of how you can use the camera itself to tell the story... if you know what you're doing.
 
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Dreadylocks said:
It's not just for making the background appear closer or farther away. It also works to making your actors (in a two-shot) appear closer together or farther apart. Which can come in handy two-fold:

1) You're trying to cheat your set-up and make it seem like the actors are sitting/standing in the same place when actually you had to move them around to get the shot you need.

2)The emotional aspect. Do you want the audience to feel that the two characters are very intimate? Or do you want it to feel like there is a great emotional distance/barrier between them? It's just one example of how you can use the camera itself to tell the story... if you know what you're doing.
Click to expand...

Okay thanks. For future projects I will keep this in mind. It would be nice to see movies with examples though, of where it was used for intimacy, but I guess it's impossible to tell by looking, if the camera is not moving, right?
 
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Just put different lenses on and look at the results. The highly compressed image from a long lens (where the background might be 1 foot or 20 feet away it's hard to tell) and a normal lens (where you have more perception of depth) is pretty easy to see.
 
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Sure. I'll have to watch movies and see if I can start to tell which focal length was used. I have tried it myself and can the see difference but only because I know the locations. I don't know the locations in other movies, so it's much harder to tell. So for future projects I should probably put on the storyboards what kind of focal length, I want then?
 
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H44, I would HIGHLY suggest that you take some film classes. Even if you don't have a school that offers them locally, they have many to choose from all over the interweb.

I took an online course through filmschoolonline.com and learned all kinds of extremely helpful elementary filmmaker stuff. I would say that about 95% of the questions you've asked on here are covered in depth through the online tutorials of the course...

Just a suggestion.
 
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