"Le Pain" - 2021


The short film "Le Pain", was written and directed by an ex-student of mine, 26 year old Pepijn Tebrunsvelt.

"Le Pain" is a historical film that follows a house search during the 2nd World War.
A German soldier investigates whether a Jewish family is hiding in a dilapidated farmhouse that only seems to be inhabited by a French speaking Belgian girl.


Selected out of 10.000 short films from all of the world and ending up at the 2022 Aesthetic Short Film Festival in York (UK) with the last 20 films selected!


"Le Pain" - The Short



"Le Pain" - The Making Of



"Le Pain" - Stills



Shooting a feature film - with five students


A former (21 year old) student of Ruurd, asked him if he wanted to shoot his first feature. 
Ruurd shot the film, used his own camera (Canon 5D Mark II), lighting, grip, audio equipment
and did the colour grading, and used the HP DreamColor Z27 monitor.

The film won the Tiliander, Den Boogaard Cultuurprijs 2014 Award.

After completing the feature film, Ruurd stated;
"It was one of the most wonderful and fun projects I have ever worked on!"


"Schaduwspel" - 2014


Writer
Producer
Marya Hüsstege

Director
Joep Lommerse

 

Winner:
Tiliander Den Boogaard Cultuurprijs
2014


Feature Showreel - Montage



Stills from "Schaduwspel"



Behind-the-Scenes



Technical Information


 

The feature film was shot on a Canon 5D Mark II camera, using Zeiss Planar ZF lenses (lenses sponsored by Camalot, Amsterdam) and shot in the Technicolor CineStyle Profile.

In post we used the NeatVideo plug-in to reduce the noise in the image. For color grading I used FCP-X.

Lighting equipment: 5x1kw plus lots of Negative Fill in order to create a natural look.

A special stocking was used for one scene below. This particular stocking was also used by cinematographers in commercials in the 60's and 70's.


SAE Amsterdam



The students had to make a test - putting a special stocking in front of the lens and try to simulate the lighting that was used in the 1930's.
Music by Rudy Vallee, "A Kiss to Remember" and titles in the shape of the swirling swimmers of "Footlight Parade", 1933.


 Below the students lighting and stocking test 



Re-creating a Screenshot


The SAE students of 2023, received the assignment to bring in their favourite screenshot of a movie and re-create this in the studio.
Each lighting class I teach, I inform the students that, when they re-create their favourite screenshot, to think of (creating) layers of light, as you would do in Photoshop.

One of the students, Giulia, took the creation of layers very seriously.

Re-creating the screenshot on the left she tried lighting both actors with one light. 
Which did not work. First of all because the faces are different then the original actors of the movie.
So, she created one layer of lighting of the man and another layer for the woman, this way she had total control over the amount of light hitting the actors faces.
She got rid of the spill-light on the rest of their bodies by using flags.

She did an excellent job on re-creating this screenshot!


Giulia's
favourite movie screenshot



Giulia's re-creation of her favourite
movie screenshot 



SintLucas Eindhoven


The students received an assignment - creating a product-shot. They could pick any of five products and light it accordingly.


Below a students product shot



Student Experiences



 Film Books - Recommendations



"Painting With Light"
by John Alton, ASC



"It's Not What you Light - It's What You DON'T Light."
Quote by
-- John Alton, ASC --



"Alexander Mackendrick
On Film-making"

Edited by Paul Cronin
Foreword by Martin Scorsese



"Remember, Movies Show and Tell."
Quote by
Alexander Mackendrick 



A few quotes from this wonderful book:

"If the scene is uninteresting in cinematic terms, then layer upon layer of dialogue will only make it more so.
One of the tasks of the director as (s)he transfers a screenplay to the medium of the moving-image-with-sound is almost to forget what his characters are saying and re-imagine their behaviour as being mute, so that all thoughts, feelings and impulses are conveyed to the audience through - sound and vision - without speech.

"Hitchcock is suggesting that a good film should be ninety percent understandable even if dubbed into a language no one sitting in the auditorium understands.
Why?
Because a well-written, acted and directed film should be able to convey its emotional meaning through the inventive use of film grammar, not words.
And it is of course, the emotional and dramatic content of any scene that really counts".



Movie - Recommendations 

The movie recommendations below are linked to the IMDb website 


1930

1940

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

    2000

     2010

2020


Directors - Recommendations


Stanley Kubrick

Alfred Hitchcock

William Wyler

Alexander Mackendrick

Louis Buñuel

Roman Polanski

John Frankenheimer

Jean-Luc Godard

Martin Scorsese

Mel Brooks

Sydney Pollack

Francis Ford Coppola

Robert Bresson

Mike Nichols

Scott Hicks

The Boulting Brothers

François Truffaut

Louis Malle

Gus Van Sant

David Lynch

David Lean

Lars von Trier

David Fincher

Guy Hamilton

F.W. Murnau

John Ford

Steven Spielberg

Fritz Lang

Thomas Vinterberg

Ingmar Bergman

Luchino Visconti

Lewis Milestone

Mervyn Leroy

John Huston

Jean-Pierre Melville

Sam Peckinpah

Billy Wilder

Carl Theodor Dreyer

George Roy Hill

Richard Brooks

Michael Curtiz

Ernst Lubitsch

Federico Fellini

Robert Wise

Akira Kurosawa

Tay Garnett

Jules Dassin

Fred Zinnemann

G.W. Pabst

Orson Welles

Howard Hawks

Kenji Mizoguchi

Jacques Becker

Jacques Tati

John Cassavetes

Leni Riefenstahl

Maurice Tourneur

Milos Forman

Mikhail Kalatozov

Norman Jewison

Otto Preminger

Peter Bogdanovich

Peter Weir

Ridley Scott

Sidney Pollack

Sam Mendez

Sergio Leone

Sidney Lumet

Vittorio de Sica

George Cukor

Henry King

Yasujirô Ozu

John Brahm

Mark Robson

Michael Haneke

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Guillermo del Toro

Lewis Gilbert

Phil Karlson

Henry Hathaway

Roberto Rossellini

Rob Reiner


Film Noir Films - Recommendations


Excerpt from the Film Noir Keynote
The History of Film Noir from beginning to end