Stealing from the Silver Screen: Using FilmGrab to Master Your Craft

Originals

Jan 28

We often find ourselves scrolling through the same social media feeds for inspiration. This leads everyone is copying the same popular styles. To break out of this loop you need to look at a medium that has been perfecting visual storytelling for over a century.

FilmGrab is an incredible online archive of high resolution movie stills. It allows you to search through thousands of films by director or cinematographer or year. It is essentially a museum of great lighting and composition that you can access for free.

Here is a strategy for using this resource to level up your work.

Study the Cinematographer not just the Movie

Most people look at movies for the actors or the plot. As a photographer you should look for the Cinematographer. They are the ones responsible for the "look" of the film.

Roger Deakins: Look at Blade Runner 2049 or 1917 to study how to use silhouettes and haze to create depth.
Robert Richardson: Study his work with Oliver Stone or Quentin Tarantino to see how he uses high key "top lighting" to make subjects pop from the background.
Paweł Pawlikowski: His films Ida and Cold War are modern monochrome masterpieces. Study these specifically to see how to use high contrast and vertical framing to tell a story.

Reverse Engineer the Lighting

When you find an image on FilmGrab that stops you in your tracks do not just admire it. Dissect it.

Look at the shadows. Where are they falling? If the shadow is under the nose the light is high. If the shadow is long and stretched the light is low. Look at the "catchlights" in the eyes of the actors; they will tell you exactly how many light sources were used and what shape they were.

By reverse engineering these stills you can learn how to recreate professional cinematic lighting in your own studio or on the street with natural light.

The Aspect Ratio Lesson

Cinematography often uses much wider aspect ratios than the standard 3:2 or 4:5 used in photography. Studying these wide frames teaches you how to manage negative space.

Notice how a cinematographer might place a character on the far left of a wide frame to emphasize their isolation. This relates directly back to our earlier discussion on the Three Word Vision. If your vision is "Solitude" studying how cinema uses wide space to make a person look small is the best education you can get.

Adapting To Monochrome

Even if a movie is in color you can use it to study black and white. Most cinematic masterpieces rely on Values (the range of light to dark) rather than just color.

If a color still from The Revenant looks powerful it is likely because the tonal contrast is strong. Try saving a few color stills from FilmGrab and converting them to black and white in your editing software. You will quickly see which cinematographers rely on color to save a shot and which ones have a "bone structure" of light that works in any format.

So…

Your camera is a tool for telling stories. Cinema is the ultimate expression of that storytelling. By spending time on FilmGrab you are exposing your brain to the highest level of visual craft in the world.

Stop looking at what is trending this week and start looking at what has been iconic for decades.