Staying Focused

Focus is one of the first things any filmmaker, young or old, new or experienced has to deal with when setting up a shot. If not given the attention it needs you may find that it stabs you in the back When the time comes to edit the footage.

One of the first tasks facing new filmmakers is the discovery that autofocus does more to harm your film than aid it. Unfortunately this is done more often than not via the age old method of learning from ones mistakes. At first clicking over the autofocus button seems like the easy option as it makes focus one less thing to think about. This is surely an advantage to any budding young cinematographer right? Afraid not.

The result of using autofocus throughout a film is that quite a large portion will in fact be out of focus due to the constant adjustments the camera makes in order to achieve what the camera deems as the best possible results. On top of this it can be apparent to the audience that in places throughout the film the camera is in fact searching for something to focus on. A good example of the problems faced when using autofocus is if you have a scene featuring two actors and autofocus is being used, what will happen is that the background behind the two actors will be in focus but the actors themselves will be out of focus. This is due to the fact that autofocus constantly searches for a central image, making it extremely difficult to achieve anything other than close ups without the focus continuously shifting, or locking on to something other than the actors in the scene.

It is a huge blow to be capturing all of your footage, all of your hard work, ready for the editing process to find out that due to autofocus the focus throughout your shots is shifting back and forth, these problems are so distracting to an audience that they become oblivious to the good points of the film so even if it featured award winning actors and actresses, the shot composition was amazing and the lighting was solid, it wouldn’t matter because the audiences attention has already been diverted to whats wrong with your film rather than them noticing whats right with it. Consequently the film is lost because everything revolves around the visual image.

That being said manual focus can be used to achieve more than just making your images look sharp and professional. If used correctly it can create quite beautiful effects that can add to the emotion, tension or drama of a scene. Effects such as beginning a shot with the foreground in focus and the background out of focus then switching bringing the background into focus leaving the foreground out of focus. For example a characters look of pain could be shown in the foreground before adjusting to show a look of anger across a characters face in the background, done with one smooth change of focus.

When trying to achieve the sharpest focus it is key to set your sights on a specific point of the shot, an example of this is when filming people it is a good tip to set the focus around the persons eye as the eye contains a lot of detail in a small space so by getting the eye right the rest of the person should follow. The most commonly used method of getting things into focus is by first over adjusting so that the point is out of focus, then by secondly readjusting so the point returns into focus before repeating the steps again, each time decreasing the amount the image goes out of focus.

The best way to determine if the focus of the eye is as sharp as it can possibly be is by decreasing the depth of field, (refer to article on depth of field). By creating a smaller depth of field there is less in the shot that is actually in focus thus giving the human eye a slight advantage in determining sharpness.

To summarise try to use manual focus instead of autofocus on cameras unless you are tyring to achieve a specific effect that you feel autofocus would lend itself well to. Oh and one more thing, one less thing to think about during filming is only one more thing to think about during editing.