We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Yinan Shi. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Yinan below.
Yinan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?
My most meaningful project happened in July of this year. I was working as the cinematographer on a narrative coming-of-age short film. It was written and directed by Jiaxin Wang, a director I have previously collaborated extensively with on music videos and short films. Our previous short film qualified for the Cinéma de Demain unit at Festival de Cannes in France. The team on this project had all worked with one another before, the hopes were high and so was the morale.
Before pre-production preparations even started, I knew this was going to be a deeply personal film for me and the director. The story is about the friendship of a boy and a girl and how they lost each other on their way to adulthood, and it all took place in front of the backdrops of Asia where both of us grew up. The physical elements of unfinished and unoccupied high-rise buildings, the scorching tropical sun, and the unspoken dynamics of being in an Asian household and the social expectations of being a boy were all too familiar to us.
To do the resonance we had with the story justice, we embarked on the most detailed preparation work for a film we have ever done for a short film, the director and I bounced ideas back and forth about the script for 6months, and we lived at the location we were going to shoot this film for a whole month before production started. This extensive prep added another layer of meaning to the project on top of being able to make something you understand and care about.
It was a challenge to translate the feelings we had as children into a visual language of sight and sound which we work with as adults in a viseral way. The language of film is always calculated, has its own grammar, and is necessarily based on a rational understanding of the human experience, As a cinematographer whose job is to design shots, set the tone for the entire film through lighting, and also involve in designing actor movement, I must understand and provide rationality to my designs. For example, a tiny push-in with the camera when the character is deep in thought could enhance the intensity of the thoughts and physically draw the audience a little closer to the possible thoughts he/she is having. I must understand what emotions and performance beats are behind every action. Having been in a similar spot as the children in the script, the best way to achieve that understanding is through relating to my own experiences.
But unlike the language of film, the human experience is not solely rational. It often has layers of emotions, and many layers of habitual reactions and is always recalled through the thick glass of time. There was a lot of recalling to be done, and even more breakdowns of my own experiences into singular elements that could be then re-assembled and captured with a camera.
There was one scene where our main character, Tao, was walking down the beach and he declined an invitation from another kid on the block to join their soccer game. Tao usually shies away from physical games that get too competitive, but he is also acquainted with many of these kids and wants company.
I decided that this scene would best be done in a single static shot where the camera stays still with zero movement. I had put the other kids playing soccer in the background of my frame, and I suggested that the kid that extended the invitation and Tao should never be in the same frame at the same time. I felt that this would best translate Tao’s avoidance through his lack of willingness to share the same physical space. But when the kid turns around to reengage in their game, it is necessary for Tao to enter the frame again in the foreground to allow the little bits of him that might have wanted to join the game to manifest. I also asked for this scene to take place during the middle of the day which is against the established cinematography traditions of shooting exterior scenes during the morning and afternoon to yield the softest sunlight quality that looks the best on the faces of the actors. It was necessary in my mind to honor the harsh mid-day sunlight that kids often play in and I myself once played in. To find a middle ground between traditions and the necessity of this film, I worked with Jiaxin to place the kids in a way that would have most of their backs towards the sun so that they would all receive a backlight or a 3/4 backlight but have no direct harsh light on their faces., Under normal circumstances, this would result in underexposure where the actors’ faces will be too dark. But since this scene took place on the beach, and given that the sand they were playing on was quite reflective, the reflection of sunlight off of the sand made up for the exposure difference and provided practica grounds for my creative decision, I then decided to expose this scene at 2/3 stop above perfect exposure to render the faces better and to drive the highlights(the sand and the sky) closer to overexposure to translate the scorching temperature of the sun and sand into a visual “temperature” the audience could feel on screen. (one frame of this shot is attached as a picture)
Throughout the pre-production phase, there was a lot of revisiting of moments I had as a child and breaking it down into emotions, reactions, and thoughts and building it up again through camera movement, shot composition, and lighting. Journey into the character with the original purpose of understanding their experience often tangled with journeys into myself and understanding my experiences the same way. Breaking down the characters opened up cracks into my past reality where I glimpsed into my and the director’s past selves. And I believe it’s this parallel that allowed us to bring pieces of our own reality through the language of film into this movie that makes it special and meaningful to me.
This film is called Melting Moment(working title), and it has just finished principal photography in July. It is expected to start its festival run in November of this year, and hopefully, it will be critically acclaimed and successful in attracting investors for a more comprehensive feature-length film.
Yinan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
My name is Yinan Shi, and I am a cinematographer(aka the guy behind the camera). I originally graduated from NYU with a degree in film production and I have been working in the film industry for a few years now. I work on music videos, short films, feature-length films, and commercials. The core of my service is translating a script or a creative idea into a visual language that gives the audience a more than visual experience. Through the camera movements I design, the frames I compose, and the lighting plan I put together, I capture the emotions of the human experience and release them in a visual way where the viewer can subconsciously take in the cues I gave and arrive back at the same human experience the script or idea was trying to lead.
I am the most proud of my acute awareness of emotions both in a script and in real life. This often translates into me being able to show an extra layer of depth in my work and I find it very enlightening when I can put this skill to use in narrative films.
Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
The one resource I have benefited from the most is Shotdeck.com. Shotdeck is a website created by a cinematographer named Lawrence Sher. He is known for his work on Joker and the Hangover trilogy. It is a digital collection of still frame of a huge array of movies, TV shows, music videos, and commercials. The quality of these stills is amazing, and the variety is insane.
The most difficult part of communicating a vision or a visual tone for a film is the “communicating” part. The reason is already in the name: “Visions’ are visual, but words are linear and rational. It is difficult to be on the same page creatively using words alone. And if that miscommunication continues in pre-production, by the time you arrive on set, set up the camera, frame the first shot, and are done lighting it, your collaborator will come by and say: oh wow, that’s not what I imagined at all, could we make some changes….”
To be on the same page during pre-production, everyone has to be aligned on a variety of aspects of a shot, such as camera angle, lighting style, composition, and camera movement. This is crucial for the director to gauge if the shots I am framing are communicating his visual style suitably, and for the art department to gauge how much of what part of the set will be shown in the shot and how they should adjust accordingly.
Shotdeck comes in very handy in that there are millions of shots posted on Shotdeck that you could use for references, and there is a glossary to help with filtering the shots by shot size, time of day, lighting style, camera angle, etc. It has saved me so much time and effort in pre-production that its value to me is beyond measure. I wish I had known about it earlier in my career so that I could do fewer stick-man drawings while communicating with the director, and less tracking down movies across streaming platforms and screenshotting frames for color references while communicating with my colorist.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
I started this path I am on with photography in elementary school. I was gifted a DSLR by my parents and learned the basics of camera operations through some books and later on bunch of YouTube videos . I also picked up many “rules” of composition from YouTube videos, such as the “rule of thirds”. When Instagram first became popular I followed many photographers who had a high following count and the majority of what they produced was orange and teal-colored photos with very straight on, and clean compositions and very sharp edges at insanely high resolutions.
This had a lot of influence on how I initially understood and viewed photography and the act of image capture. I had etched into my mind the rule of thirds (always putting my subject on the left 1/2 or right 1/3 of the frame, usually top 1/3 or bottom 1/3 too), and I favored a lot of orange and teal in my photos. I would post them on my Instagram and feel good about myself. What I was shooting looked more pleasant than the images one would take with one’s phone, but it wasn’t something someone else could not shoot. There was a popular formula and I followed it.
It took me a while to realize that there is way more to image capture than what I was doing. There were masters out there that followed none of these rules. I saw William Eggleston and how he used colors with such audacity to realize that the orange and teal style is just a popular eye candy. I had to see Nobuyoshi Araki to realize that there were more than aesthetic rules that one should follow in one’s photography. It was Helmut Newton who showed me the power of tonality, proportion, and balance.
I had to ease off on the rule of the third train, and welcome these new elements into my mind when I compose an image. It was immensely difficult at first. Without the rules, it was almost impossible to do anything, everything felt wrong, and it felt like a massive step back and there was suddenly no sense of direction. Because, well, I didn’t exactly grow up in the world of black and white photography to have the drive to introduce color to photography like William Eggleston and Saul Leiter, nor did I have the feelings of Nobuyoshi Araki to guide my hands, and I definitely did not have the eyes of Helmet Newton for beautiful tonality.
I was suddenly not “good” at what I was doing anymore, and the flow I had that was linked to the formula I was following was gone. When I saw something interesting, the old feelings of “let’s put this in this part of my frame, and click the shutter and be done with it” speed and flow was no longer working. All the previously hidden by rule of thirds possibilities started to emerge, and I had to face it with my own intuition and rationality to create my image that is true to the way I observe and the feelings I felt at the moment of observation. I became slower, but more thoughtful in my captures.
I did not realize until much later that this was my awakening as an artist. Through looking at and analyzing the works of true artists before me, and not the eye candy everyone loves, I had began to reflect on the habits I had built for myself. I seems to me that those habits were of the un-thoughtful, and had no clear aim other than to make something aesthetically pleasing. It also seemed to me that the masters that came before me, through their notes and darkroom drawings, were very careful with every element they let into their frame, and the frame they so carefully curated was a means to an even higher end.
Today, when I see something interesting, the thought process behind the photo I take, if I take anything at all, is entirely different. I would first stop, and ask myself what was it that sparked my interest, was it something visual, or was it a story-like moment. Once the exact thing is pin-pointed, I then construct the frame around that element, and everyline and color I allow in the frame serves one purpose and that is to recreate the interest I felt at the moment in the image I am about to create.
In many ways, this still applies to my work as a cinematographer today. There is a singular feeling in the script that dominates the scene much like the point of interest I take notice of, there are story beats scattered throughout the scene much like lines and blocks of color on the street, and the end in cinematography is to capture the feelings and story beats in a visual language that would lead the audience in the same direction the director and the script would like them to go in. Instead of being given lines and shapes in nature and a single moment in time, I now get to capture lines and shapes designed by the production designer with the sole purpose of serving the story and I get to design camera movements that takes the audience through a longer moment in time. There is always an end to be served with the means of my craft, and it takes much more than just the rule of thirds and orange and teal. But it all began when I realized there is more to image capture than the popular kitsch everyone is used to, and that it was up to me to make the means I had at hand to serve an end of my own. Had it not been for the realization, and then the attempt to unlearn my habits, shotdeck.com I mentioned in the previous response would be of no use to me and I probably wouldn’t have the meaningful project I did in July.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yiiiiinan_shiiii
- Other: Cinematography reel:
vimeo.com/913722896?share=copy
