Making a Scene Bradley Cooper

Great cinematography in a series of shorts by Janusz Kaminski

Janusz Kaminski has directed an interesting series of eleven shorts (or vignettes) for the New York Times. Each short is one-minute long and uses only one actor – but a great one, for example, Cate Blanchett, Robert Redford. The super short format doesn’t allow for much storytelling, but the vignettes still manage to be entertaining. But what stood out for me the most was the cinematography.

Kaminski is most famous as a cinematographer, having produced outstanding work on many of Spielberg’s movies (ex. “Saving Private Ryan”, “Schindler’s List”). In the case of this series, though, Kaminski limited himself to directing. This time, the credit for outstanding cinematography is due to Bartosz Nalazek. These vignettes are a great teaching tool because each offers a very contrasting cinematography style – but they are all executed to perfection. So, I encourage any inspiring cinematographers and filmmakers to analyze these shorts. See what techniques were used to achieve the specific look and try to reproduce it yourself.

You can see the series here.

For those of you who have not seen my cinematography tutorials – and there are a lot of them – a good starting point is Tutorial #3 “How to Light a Romantic Film Scene” based on my short film “Dinner Date”.

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