Lubezki & Malick - a dogme

This is the series of parameters agreed by Terrence Malick and his DoP Emmanuel Lubezki for Tree of Life...

• Shoot in available natural light.
• Do not underexpose the negative. Keep true blacks.
• Preserve the latitude of the image.
• Seek maximum resolution and fine grain.
• Seek depth with deep focus and stop: "Compose in depth."
• Shoot in backlight for continuity and depth.
• Use negative fill to avoid light sandwiches (even sources on both sides)
• Shoot in crosslight only after dawn or before dusk; never front light.
• Avoid lens flares.
• Avoid white and primary colors in frame.
• Shoot with short focal length, hard lenses.
• No filters, except Polarizer.
• In the eye of the hurricane, shoot with steady handheld or Steadicam.
• Z-axis moves instead of pans and tilts.
• No zooming.
• Do some static tripod shots "in midst of our haste"
• Accept the exception to the dogma (a.k.a Article E) - Article E however does not apply underexposure of the negative.

Abstract image sequence

This exercise required that I find a short musical sequence, listen to it several times whilst recording emotions and feelings and images that came to mind.

I chose the beginning of a piece by a friend, Pascal Fricke. He called it Conversations but I tried not to think about that, at first, and then actually found that was not really what came to mind for me.

Initially I expected to find the music to evoke sad imagery but i found myself thinking of warmth and safety and family. There are some little 'edgy' moments, just like in life , and in my sequence, I have tried to channel a bit of Terrence Malick's Tree of Life.  With my fire imagery, I could imagine some whispering over the top, people talking to their gods.

I chopped up this up a lot to time some of the fire bursts with the music but did not want to overdo this as I felt it could get comical and spoil the mood. This can work well as we saw in Beware Mr Baker when drum beats were matched with explosions from WW2 footage but that had a very different feel throughout.

This abstract work excites me and I would like to experiment more.