What is Cinematography?
The simple answer is 'Cinema + Photography' or a textbook definition would come to 'delivering and capturing the flow and tone of the story through the scope of a camera and its resultant visuals'.
To clarify the difference between a Director and Cinematographer is that a Cinematographer is the person in charge of the camera to film scenes, meanwhile the Director would make changes and decisions to what the Cinematographer had filmed. However, the visual interpretation with the use of light and darkness of a particular shot would still be determined by the Cinematographer. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the Cinematographer to explain to the Director on how the story would be told with his/her visual judgments.
What does it take to be nominated for Best Cinematography?
A sure-win formula to get a nomination is to film places that most people have never been to or things that are difficult to be seen, or even purely imaginary, yet stunning. Thus, the Cinematographer plays a crucial role in selecting the appropriate places or sceneries in order to trigger the audience's visual stimuli, and more importantly in terms of Oscars, to impress the voters.
Beauty of Nature
Skyfall - Scotland
Lord of the Rings - New Zealand
Beyond imagination
Avatar
Pan's Labyrinth
Continual sequence of beautiful scenes
Tree of Life
Days of Heaven
Contrast of Light
There Will Be Blood
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Does winning Best Cinematography go hand in hand with Best Visual Effects?
The straight answer is yes, for recent years. Starting from 2009, Best Cinematography winners Avatar (2009), Inception (2010), Hugo (2011) and Life of Pi (2012) won Best Visual Effects as well. Such trend is not coincidental at all, but more in the advancement of technology for filmmakers.
Building of structures to create motion in order to deliver the world of imagination, such as what we saw in Inception above, redefines the art of filmmaking through the eyes of the cinematographer via the camera.
Does the following image look familiar?
It was the setting or simulator built to film the scene when Joseph Gordon Levitt fights with the securities along the hotel corridor. To my knowledge, the simulator can spin around which creates the effect when the fighting would happen from floor to ceiling of the corridor. Visually, this is exciting to the audience.
Another example would be Life of Pi when everything seen on screen was just purely imaginary and made up by computer graphics, including the tiger. During the filming of Pi, most structures that simulate the shipwrecks and the float of the boat were built in the vicinity of a huge water tank (see image below). Yet, this is another innovative achievement in filmmaking and the visuals in Pi are magnificent when different forms of nature are witnessed, and even the 'secret island' which is beyond the imagination of the audience. The setting of the story and the visual effects amount to Claudio Miranda's vision and mastery in telling a beautiful story through his motion of the camera.
It is evident that there is a shift in the Academy's perception towards Cinematography nowadays and films that are shot beautifully with their stunning visual effects would tend to win both categories. Technology involved in Cinematography has overtaken the importance of 'light' to contrast the film's characters and 'natural sceneries' to stand out the film's visual exposure in the past.
Innovation is what keeps an industry going and whatever film demonstrates a breakthrough would get what they deserve. The combination of photography along with the appropriate use of computer-produced visual effects is promising to the audience with the film's underlying message delivered, yet permitting the full enjoyment of the unbelievable cinematic experience.
Who will win Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects?
The answer is quite obvious as Gravity pulled its weight in developing an innovative and impressive technical breakthrough in filmmaking, especially resembling those anti-gravitational movements. The stunning views from space on the Earth are just spectacular and these include the eye of a storm with clouds surrounding it, night lights of cities and the gradually diminishing sunlight from the edge of the curve when the Earth rotates to the dark side.
Who is the visionary behind the camera apart from Alfonso Cuaron's sensational directorial achievements? He is Emmanuel Lubezki who has been nominated 6 times for Best Cinematography including Gravity. His other notable works include Children of Men directed by Alfonso Cuaron and The Tree of Life directed by Terrence Malick who is another visionary in admiration for the beauty of nature.
Through the eyes of Emmanuel, not only has he depicted the beauty of Earth as well as the Solar system, but also Gravity involved first person vision from the view of Sandra Bullock in her spacesuit and mostly third person angles of space equipments and their disasters, and how the characters dealt with these situations. This is truly a visually breath-taking cinematic experience, in particular the audience would feel as if they were in space experiencing the same 'anti-gravitational' motions as Sandra and George through Emmanuel's skilful technique in combining photography and technology.
Gravity is very likely to sweep all the technical categories this year and with Emmanuel's reputation and unique vision in storytelling, Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects would go hand in hand. Without one or the other, Gravity would not have been that amazing to see and feel.
Other notable masters in Cinematography
- Robert Richardson (won 3 Oscars)
- Roger Deakins (nominated for 11 Oscars; nominee this year for Prisoners)
- Wally Pfister (won 1 Oscar for Inception)
- Bruno Delbonnel (nominated for 4 Oscars; nominee this year for Inside Llewyn Davis)
- Conrad Hall (won 3 Oscars)
- Vittorio Storaro (won 3 Oscars)
- Robert Surtees (won 3 Oscars)
