How to Create a Reference Library as a Cinematographer
Ever since I pitched my Sweeney Todd idea last Monday, it was obvious that the visual style of the ad needed to be spot on and thus discussed both in detail and in length to ensure that we would be able to create the style that we wanted.
For this reason, both our director Has and I in my function as a cinematographer decided to meet up and discuss both the storyboard as well as the visual style of the commercial.
But how do you effectively communicate your visual style? While a storyboard is a splendid means of describing what you see in each frame as the story progresses – be it subject-based, object-based, framing-wise or in regard to angles – it is much more difficult to describe a visual style beyond terms like ‘fast-paced’, ‘slow-paced’, ‘sepia-toned’, etc.
Since I wanted to communicate my idea without literally losing it in translation, I looked for options on how professional cinematographers effectively communicate their ideas and style. And what shall I say; I came across the concept of visual reference libraries, which I will discuss in this blog entry.
The Visual Reference Library
The visual reference library, while not only used in filmmaking and cinematography, is an important tool for any creative job in the visual arts such as e.g. illustration and photography. Also referred to as a ‘reference Bible’, it is an utterly helpful and specific tool that speeds up the pre-production process, especially between the director and the cinematographer but also between the cinematographer and the camera and lighting departments.
A visual reference library (also sometimes referred to as ‘storyboard of inspiration‘) is a physical and/or digital register or database of still images or any sort of visual media – be it photographic, cinematic, or even paintings – that is strictly organised in structure and hierarchy. It serves to give a detailed impression of the visual style and the mood that you are after and quickly informs anyone in your crew on how you envision the film.
But how do you create a reference library? How do you organise it and what goes into it?
How to Create a Reference Library
Ideally, before you do anything else than obtaining images and organising them in folders, you would first start out and read the script multiple times as to get a feel for the genre, time period, the mood, character and their development and even the locations needed. This reading would thus inform you about the cinematic world that you and the director are about to create.
After reading the script and considering the budget at hand, you as a cinematographer would then have a rough idea of the kind of equipment that might be sensible for the production, which, in turn, informs you about the kind of imagery – or rather cinematography – you would likely be able to achieve.
In order to create amazing cinematography, you would ideally be looking at examples of amazing cinematography, not only to be inspired, but also to learn how to recreate it. You would be able to take screen caps of you favourite images, research a certain cinematographer or just go online and look into a general visual reference library such as e.g. Pinterest or Screenmusings.org. In this regard, you would not only want to collect and organise images that you would like to replicate, but you would also either note down on how the original cinematographer recreated the image or, if no information was to be given on the creation process, you would first have to try and recreate it in experimentation.
Now, if you have found a visual example that you would love to recreate, you would ideally create a folder (either digitally or physically) and start collecting as well as organising said images. While it would be quick and easy to create a folder for each film project and just randomly drop an image in every now and then, this praxis would not serve you for long, as it is quite unorganised and will become a difficult beast to tame, once your reference library has grown by a couple of film projects.
But how do you organise these images then?
Building a Reference Library with Patrick O’Sullivan
A particularly helpful approach to creating a visual reference library was given by Patrick O’Sullivan from The Wandering DP Podcast. In this podcast, O’Sullivan explains how he developed and organised his reference library over the course of his career and how it helped him not only to acquire more film projects due to his speed and associated professionalism, but also to understand cinematography better.
O’Sullivan explained the two-tiered structure of his digital reference library like this: At the beginning of his reference library, he would have two folders: The first folder is extremely specific – broken down into tiny elements – while the second folder is rather broad – only containing lighting ideas or moods – depending on what the client needs.
Starting with the first folder within the reference library, the path structure down into the rabbit hole goes as follows: As you open the first folder, the next ‘level’ presented to you will be ordered by the time of day, which means that you will have a folder each for e.g.‘Day’, ‘Night’, ‘Dawn’, and ‘Dusk’. Opening any one of these folders will lead you to the next level of folders, ordered by locations such as ‘INT’ for internal and ‘EXT’ for external.
Opening any of these folders will lead you to another category of sub-folders pertaining to locations, this time though the locations are more concrete in nature, such as e.g. ‘Bar’, ‘Dog house’, and ‘Shed’. Opening these folders again, leads to further folders describing shot sizes and sequences such as e.g. ‘Medium close up’ and ‘Wide shot’ or ‘Medium shot to extreme close up’ for tracking shots. Opening these folders for the last time will then present you with the actual images, named and numbered in a structure like this:
Time of Day_INT/EXT_Location_Shot Size_Image Number Within Folder
The second, rather broad and unspecific, folder structure that O’Sullivan mentioned was the mood-based approach, that is structured similarly to the one described above, but this time only following a file-path that runs from ‘Mood’ or ‘Lighting Ideas’, to ‘Types of Lighting’, and finally ‘Lenses’.
Application of Research
Since I was the scriptwriter of my own idea and tend to write scripts according to the images that pop up in my mind, the task of reading and coming up with a visual representation was a no-brainer to me. However, regarding the limited budget at hand and the stores’ equipment at hand, the task of correctly estimating the cinematography was a bigger challenge to me.
Thus, I decided to get inspirations first and then starting into whether the ideas that were to my liking would actually be reproducible with the means that I would have at hands. Thus, I started out with the Sweeney Todd film from 2007 and looked into its visual style. While it was properly eerie for the subject matter, it was immediately obvious that recreating it would be highly dependant not only on the location that we would be getting, but would also hinge on a large amount of equipment to block, recreate and redirect light (which would, in turn, exceed our transporting capacities we would have regarding our budget).
Since I deemed the visual style of Sweeney Todd to difficult to achieve for now (and even more difficult considering the light sensitivity of the film stock we already ordered (Kodak’s Vision 2 250D), I opted to have a look at period films that were set in about the same period to get further inspirations on how to approach the style. I figured that, with the humorous twist we would put onto the urban legend of Sweeney Todd, we would be able to ‘get away’ with a faded, rather sepia-like colour palette.
Instead of the black, white, and red visuals that I imagined based on the packaging of the snack bar, I thus decided that a yellowy shade instead of white would match as well, as it has often been used in period dramas placed in Victorian times. This also fits the properties of our film stock, as it seems to be particularly strong with earthy, yellowish tones. This can be seen in the following screen caps, which I took from the Kodak commercial promoting the Vision 3 film stock by comparing it to the Vision 2 film stock that we will be using. All the images shown in the following are thereby from the Vision 2 film stock:
Being inspired by the possibilities of the Vision 2 250D film stock, I thus looked at two examples I remembered, that were mostly based on a yellow colour palette: The Duchess (2008) and the American rendition of Pride and Prejudice (2005). I found a couple of images within them, that I really liked to recreate mood-wise and took screenshots of them. Since I do not yet know what the final filming location will be like, I decided that I would not spend my time on framing and blocking just yet, but rather await the possibilities and limitations that would be given by the location itself and focus on the mood for now. Thus, I opted to go for the second folder type of O’Sullivan’s reference library structure.
Remembering that the sci-fi genre film The Martian (2015) also offered a yellowy colour palette, I decided to have a quick look into its cinematography as well. However, I quickly discarded the idea, as it was not only difficult to successfully apply imagery (and moods) across such diametrically opposed genres such as period drama and science fiction, the excessive use of CGI in The Martian furthermore also rendered it difficult for me to properly retrace the cinematic creation of its images. Thus I decided to stick with period drama.
Liking what I’ve found so far and focusing on the mood, I thus decided – for my first visual reference library – to organise the images according to interior shots and exterior shots, and sub-divide each folder by the mood that I want to recreate visually. Thus, I ended up with a very basic folder structure that ran from ‘Interior’ or ‘Exterior’ to moods such as ‘Sad’, ‘Happy’, and ‘Desperate’.
Realising that all the images I chose so far are creating a unified and coherent visual style as well as mood, I then put them into their right folders. These are the images I’ve chosen up until now:
With this visual library then, I thus went into a visual pre-production meeting with Has to discuss our unified vision of the style of our commercial. With the help of this tool, I was able to demonstrate to him how I envisioned the commercial and we both quickly came to the conclusion that this was the style we would be going for. While I also collected a darker version of our visual style that rather resembled the Sweeney Todd movie of 2007, just in case the location would allow for it, we nonetheless settled on the sepia-tones. I was amazed by the effectiveness of the reference library, as we spent less than two minutes on explaining the overall visual style. This goes to show that ‘One image tells more than a thousand words ever could’, as we would say in German.
And while I realise that my reference library hitherto is less complex in structure as O’Sullivan’s approach is (it only covers the second, less structured element of a mood-based library), its basic structure already helped me getting an idea of how effective and helpful a tool it can be and I will try to further expand and structure it with the projects to come and the skills I will be gathering along the way.
References:
Burton, T. (2007) Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street [DVD] USA and UK: Warner Bros.
Dibb, S. (2008) The Duchess [DVD] UK et. al.: Paramount Vantage et. al.
Jordan P. Anderson (2015) Cinematography Lesson #1: Pre-Production [online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzWC9ut9zyU [Accessed on 27 October 2018]
Jordan P. Anderson (2015) Cinematography Lesson #2: Visual References [online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ8_FecoZvk [Accessed on 27 October 2018]
Kodak.com (2018) VISION3 250D Color Negative Film 5207/7207 [online] https://www.kodak.com/GB/en/motion/Products/Production/5207/default.htm [Accessed on 27 October 2018]
O’Sullivan, P. (2015) The Wandering DP Podcast #25: Building a Reference Library [online] http://wanderingdp.com/podcast/the-wandering-dp-podcast-episode-25-building-a-reference-library/ [Accessed on 27 October 2018]
Pinterest (n.d.) Pinterest [online] https://www.pinterest.com/pinterest/ [Accessed on 27 October 2018]
Scott, R. (2015) The Martian [DVD] USA and UK: Twentieth Century Fox
Screenmusings (n.d.) Screenmusings Movie Screencaps [online] https://screenmusings.org [Accessed on 27 October 2018]
Wright, J. (2005) Pride and Prejudice [DVD] France, UK, and USA: Focus Features