Cinematic Cookbook Vol. 1 – Brad Rushing

Indie Drama

Need something moody? Learn the real-life techniques used in award-winning independent films to get a gritty, realistic feel on the cheap!

The ingredients in this recipe will keep your project mobile and fast and make your video look realistic and moody

Modern Comedy

Get some laughs! Learn how to use ingredients like hand-held camera and pop zooms to create a spontaneous comedic look.

Shows like Modern Family, Parks and Recreation, and Arrested Development inspired this fun, unpredictable style.

Pop Horror

Don’t open that door! Movies like The Exorcist, Halloween, and Poltergeistserved up this dish. But the Pop Horror look isn’t just for movies. Use it in educational or promotional videos to paint a scary picture of what will happen if your audience doesn’t listen to what you have to say!

Ingredients like crabbing dolly moves and low-angle light make this Pop Horror recipe a killer!

Noir

Feeling mysterious? This classic stylized look was inspired by movies like Casablanca, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, and The Third Man.

Ingredients like a light slash and hard kickers will get that classic noir look you’re going for!

Beauty Shot

Sometimes you just need to make someone look amazing! This classic fashion beauty shot is on every great cinematographer’s menu.

Learn how broad high-key lighting and hard kickers made this look pop!

Modern Horror

Even MORE scary?! We can serve that up. This hyper-real Modern Horror recipe used ingredients like high shutter speed and hand-held camera to create an eerie and frantic look that will keep your audience on the edge of their seats!

Movies like 28 Days Later, The Ring, and The Grudge inspired this frenetic, scary style.

Your story is like a road map for cinematography. It tells you everything you need to know about how to approach lighting and shooting each scene of your project.

Does your subject need to look powerful? Shoot them at a low angle. Does the scene needs to look funny? Use broad, high-key lighting to brighten the mood. Does it need to look gritty and realistic? Use hand-held camera.

In Cinematic Cookbook, we start off each recipe covering the most important element: story. The story you are telling, the message you are sending, the emotion you want your viewers to feel will inform all the creative and technical decisions you make on set.

With that knowledge in hand, you’ll be able to easily answer questions like, “Where should we put the camera?” “What’s the shot size?” “Is the camera moving or static?” “How should the subject be lit?”

Y (vertical) angles tell a story. A high angle looking down on the subject can make them seem inferior or passive. A low angle can make them seem powerful or authoritative.

X (horizontal) angles tell a story. If the camera is more off to the side, the shot’s going to feel more objective and less intimate than if the camera is closer to the subject’s eyeline.

And Z (rotated, or dutch) angles tell a story of danger, energy or unbalance.

Cinematic Cookbook will enhance your understanding of camera angles to enable you to tell your story more effectively.

Wide shots establish where we are, what time of day it is, and who we are watching. Closeups put us right in the subject’s personal space. As a shot size gets tighter, we move from a public, objective perspective into a personal, subjective one.

Cinematic Cookbook also explores focal length, which has a huge impact on the feel of your shot. Wide angle lenses in mediums and closeups distort and exaggerate facial features.

Longer lenses make your depth of field appear shallower, due to the magnification of the image because of the narrower angle of view. So long lenses accentuate the blur of the background, and make your subject really pop out from the background.

Camera movement can reveal new information to the audience, draw them closer to subjects, follow people through spaces, and add stylistic flair.

If you need to pull the audience into a person or even a product, dolly in! Even a simple tracking shot on a $80 slider can add a massive amount of production value. With a simple camera move, your project can instantly feel like a Hollywood production… if you’re moving the camera for the right reason, that is.

In Cinematic Cookbook, we walk through when, why, and how we move the camera.

Light sets the mood. A dark scene with heavy shadows will inevitably feel more moody (or even scary) than a bright scene with few shadows.

And with just a few lights and minimal grip equipment, Cinematic Cookbookshows you how a master DP creates stunning lighting setups, from frightening horror to upbeat comedy.

Behind-the-scenes footage and 3D animations spell out exactly how we achieved each look.

Cinematic Cookbook is 99% about production. But at the end of each section, we show you what touches of color grading we made to finalize the look we were going for.

Some scenes just needed a tiny correction to make the footage look great. But others used strong color grading to complete the emotional effect we were going for.