 Hi! It's me again. I promised I'll be putting out more content, but there's been a lot of work, which is a good thing, which means I have income to be able to do other things and make this. Okay, so I had like a spare few minutes and I kind of cut something, hence this whole I just woke up look. So probably for the next four weeks you'll be stuck with this something gets out of the way. Okay, but it's nice to be back to sit down and have these conversations that I hope will be meaningful to you and I hope would actually bring you some growth and probably tips here and there to improve your workflow. So today we'll just I'll just tell you we'll be discussing my process, what I do and some of the common tools I actually take along with me for scouts that are actually useful to my cinematography process. One of the tools we could start with is the app. It's an app that's available on the App Store both on Android and on iOS. It's called Sunseeker. I know you might have heard of it so many times, I can't tell you how invaluable it has been that actually when you go to locations, right, some locations could be very amazing and from these locations you it makes sense to actually know where the sun is coming and the times you plan on shooting certain scenes because I can't tell you how many times I've been I've seen a great location only to check where the sun's orientation is and you find out that you are not set up for success because most of the time when we like the exterior we like to like backlit scenarios and some of these times if you do not end up imagine your sun actually flatten out your subject and that's how you deal you have to like deal with it when you now find out that the retention of the sunspot is actually awkwarder of what you're trying to do and it actually makes your life way more difficult because you be fighting nature and in scenarios like that an app is very helpful you can coordinate with your producer you can coordinate your location manager and with the client giving them both technical and creative reasons that says oh no the sun is going to be like this this way and as a result we will not get the best of lighting setups or at the time the sun will be at the point we need it to be we'll be in rush for time and it will not set up for success so it's all about balance and being able to do all of that the next is Artemis which is a very very cool app for when I'm not going around with this I will tell you what this is in the bit let me just break it out it's like the digital version of your director of use finder you get and it's quite light because when you're going out and about you just like need to like bring out the portable app go in there select your cameras most cameras are like there they're not totally updated with all the lenses options because sometimes I usually play around the actually play around the weird territory of lens options you get so not everything is there but mainstream lens like the air lens the Canon lens the Zeiss lens the most of the popular options about let's say 80 percent of the lens they still get updated but yeah keep that in mind what that helps you do is you could virtually take a lens that you plan on using and you could actually see a perspective frame of what it could look like and this frame could be used for storyboarding planning or give you a sense of whether it even works in case you're shooting let's say you go into like anamorphic mode and think what's the composition like what you're promising what your mind is thinking does it match with the realism of what you're facing and that could actually help inform those conversations on what you think would actually work Artemis is actually quite great but at the best level of like composing the frame the field of view and say okay here's the first shot is gonna we're gonna like frame it like this you can take that and make your scribbles right join your standings or make certain like diagrams and take that document and you can easily communicate to your gaffer because when gaffer gets there he sees the picture recognize okay we're lighting from this window we're doing from this it's going to be like triple diffusion it's going to be all the technical language and jagons this is where the gensome situated get this how the direction of the actors are pushing in so the entire technical team could be on the same page with you from that same documents in your pre-production process so on the next gear that i like it's a repetition but this is way more fun why because there's something about working with tools right and pressing your phone when you're on set it's almost like a spiritual process because your phone is a distraction like when you're trying to work on Artemis you never can tell some messages could come there's an emergency there's a notification something could distract you or sometimes you are not even aware of your battery and your phone dies while you're doing so which is why i try as much as possible to limit their much of digital footprint that's actually present on set it covers from like 10 mm to or close to about 200 300 millimeters you get and you get all your expert ratio from your one four by three to 16 by nine to 185 to two by two all of it is just there on this box and you actually have like dioptes that's located on it whereby you can actually adjust it to what your eye sees and you could also one of the cool things is that you could also mimic the sensor plane that you're working from from anamorphic to super 35 to micro forteds to super 16 you could just click it and get like a simulation and why does it super great like i could literally plug this in my eye walk around the entire room find the entire perspective i think works and like bring the camera here set the frame like this and this is how i want to see right it's more efficient before i used to play with cameras like the take a picture and show the frame but sometimes the sensor does not match because when you use like a 5d mark 3 to like take a picture and give it you may be shooting a super 35 camera you get and your 5d will take a full frame picture which means the perspective would differ and even if you try to match it with like a wider lens the depth of field would also differ so it makes it a lot more an inaccurate process just like guess and get it right you need like a a dp who's way super technical to be able to like take out all the difference account for it and actually get you what you desire you get so this is very valuable in that process of just being the moment cutting yourself off from electronic social media and just be present in the entirety of what you're seeing demands and what you're trying to achieve i said the best for the last because i would like to term it an extension which is everybody says dead most people do not believe in it and i understand the light meter you get everybody has gone onto the places whereby they use false colors i like a lackman zone personally they use waveform histograms and other exposure to they are all great right even among those digital tools some of my favorite or at the top of that is output at lackman zones there because it communicates in film stop you could also buy the very cheap one from the used market and the reason why that is very good is because this has both the ambient meter that you can just get a general reading of what the entire ambience is and it also has like the spot meter to actually take targeted readings you get so right now if i just for fun we're here right like i could fire this up and i'll say okay so the meter has like your your ISO your shutter speed and the frame per second you're shooting right and has several modes that are also useful for photography but that's out of this conversation but for the sake of just measurement right we'll just like take a reading and see what do we see here like the ambient reading we're having is at five six you get and we can i could also like switch into the spot meter modes and take like a incident reading if i had like a targeted exposure i would just like go in there and like okay check what the skin is what's that highlight reading now what's the stop gaps and all of this and it's super useful because like i said it takes me away from what i would like to call chimping around the camera which most of the time most of us do you get one last time for actually i actually forgot to throw into the mix that has become a regular on it's not really vital but at the same time it's kind of important you get it's the ac waistband i think i have one that comes to pouch i think this one is from i've forgotten where it's from but yeah it comes in it has like a buckle you do not need to get this you could use your regular belt but the reason why i prefer this it has velcros right and if it's not going to disgrace itself you could literally just move this out of the way right and you'd have like this pouch so this can actually go into like this and um stick on it because they are both and i have my tools on my waist so for the life of me these are like um my go-to tools that i actually like work with on a daily basis presently it took me a while to actually get here so i didn't wake up on money and say this is your status list so i'm not saying if you do not have this you can start your journey or if you're actually walking cinematographer you just go out there because like all of them at once could be like a lot of investment so you just creep up the other things i'd like to put in my tool kit they're not yet in there but yes those those would come in as we go forward like as we go forward in the entire conversation and being able to like deliver our cinematic intent because everything is done in the service of history and whatever makes that happen effectively and efficiently is a win so until next time i see you where we'll grab the next conversation um 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