Framing the story

Ronald E. Hole


Director Yoni Klein has made a personal and close story about a girl in his class. He has kindly let us in on how he produced the video.

- I had some initial ideas of situations I wanted to include in the shooting, like shots of Tatiana at home, getting around her college’s campus and in her classes, tells Klein.

- I spent a few meetings getting to know her and gaining her trust and these were good opportunities to brainstorm possible shots. But in the end, much of what I ended up using was scenes that were unplanned and just came up while I was with her.

- The shots of the box, for example were not planned, but when I saw the way the light was coming in and the potential for a metaphor, I knew that this would frame the story well. While shooting, most of the action was undirected, although there were times when I asked Tatiana to repeat actions again. In my opinion this is fine as long as you are faithful to the meaning behind the images.

While shooting, most of the action was undirected, although there were times when I asked Tatiana to repeat actions again. In my opinion this is fine as long as you are faithful to the meaning behind the images

The technical stuff

- I shot about five hours of raw footage over three days. I enjoyed using the camera - I love the shallow depth of field it can achieve and its low noise output. However, on a few shots where my aperture was stopped down, the aliasing artifacts were quite annoying. It was nearly impossible to check focus on the screen in direct sunlight, which prompted me to buy a Zacuto Z-finder Pro after this production. The eBay shoulder brace was effective but not really comfortable for long periods of time. I'm looking into some more balanced shoulder rigs at the moment.

- This piece was shot on a Canon 5D Mark II. In terms of lenses, I used Canon’s 50mm f/1.4 and 28mm f/2.8. I used B & W neutral density filters for the outdoor shots, but it would have been nice to have a Singh Ray or Fader ND for more convenience when rapidly changing lighting conditions. The audio was recorded on a Sony PCM-D50 audio recorder that was mounted on top of the camera using a hotshoe adapter. The camera was mostly handheld using a cheap shoulder brace from ebay, but also on a fluid head tripod for some shots.

- We did the interviews after most of the film was shot and got about an hour of voice-over material. The interviews were also done with the Sony PCM-D50. As its mics have a wide pick-up pattern, I had to ensure that the recorder was physically quite close to Tatiana to overcome the ambient sound.

- The piece was edited in Final Cut Pro 7. All the camera files were converted to ProRes 422 using the Canon EOS plugin and the audio was synced using Plural Eyes. The edit took about 10 hours for the initial cut.

Yoni Klein

Yoni Klein is a film maker and photographer based out of San Francisco.

His passions are travelling, telling great stories and passing on his knowledge of film and photography to others.

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