Cinematography Fundamentals

To tell a visual story, you’ll need to construct images in three dimensions so they deliver the information and the impact you want them to. You've got a rectangle, and a near-infinite corridor of space within it -- these are not limitations, but opportunities.

Minute by minute, filmmaking can be expensive. This makes pre-production tools like storyboards -- planning out your shots visually on paper -- efficient and indispensable.

Movies are fundamentally recordings of light and shadow, and from the art form's very beginning it's been this basic allure that's drawn us to the screen. You’ll learn how light and shadow have been used by artists over the long history of movies.

The capacity for movement is where movies completely have it over every other art form, whether by way of pans, tilts, zooms, tracking shots, handheld explorations, or combinations thereof. The visceral excitement of a movie when it truly moves is a unique and special cultural experience. You’ll take a look at over a century's worth of how, and why, filmmakers have made it happen.

Editing the sight and sound of a film project requires planning and attention to fine details. You’ll learn the fundamentals of configuring a project, creating a sequence, adjusting audio levels, finessing edit points, applying basic post effects and color correction, and exporting video in a web-ready format.