Joseph V. Mascelli (
Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review
neccessary book , March 27, 2008
By
Victor Gray (Maui, Hawaii)
This book is great. That's all there is to it really. Anyone who is interested in cinematography and making films should own it.
Wooohooo, February 17, 2008
By
Shane Foster (Fresno, CA)
It is soooo nice to have a book like this. I refer to it all the time. It covers just about everything I ever wanted to know about placing and moving and framing, or to sum it up, USING a camera to visually achieve the most emotional draw from an audience. While it doesn't have technical aspects like using a light meter, it is very technical, however it doesn't just give you a list of rules to follow that you can later learn to break. It teaches why those rules work, and how to break them. But it doesn't stop there. It explains why you can break the rules and how to apply this creativity to your film.
It is full of examples that you can watch for yourself. It is pretty much a book that no one considering cinematography as a career should be without!
Good for the REAL basics, January 12, 2008
By
Jaime Byrd (Asheville, NC United States)
This is no doubt a very BASIC book on Cinematography from 1965 (but still applicable today)- yet if you are unfamiliar with the basic Five C's of shooting, then it is a good tool for learning these rules. I recommend it for film students new to camera work. But if you have been working with shooting for awhile, it may be a little too basic.
How can one make art without knowing the rules?, December 26, 2007
By
E. Mayer (Union City, CA)
The Five C's of Cinematography is basically a rule book on the form of motion picture making as it relates to camera angles, movements and editing. This book is the "bible" or rule book of the techniques of film making, such as painting has composition rules itself. A true artist not only knows the rules, but understands the rules of why it is used. The Five C's does all that, it shows and explains the what therefores and hows. It even shows the wrongs in a clear fashion, which is amazing since this is a book of still images about a medium of moving images.
The best artists knew the rules of their art, and either followed them or break them to get the effect they wanted. If one does not know the rules, one can not realize the effect they are creating by breaking the rules. That is why most modern artists of today seem muddled and unfocused and Picasso still evokes and moves one. Picasso knew the rules. This book will help one know the rules of film.
The images and wording may be dated, even quaint, but once one looks past such superficial cosmetics, the information is a gold mine of a very large vein in information
One of the three, December 20, 2007
By
R. Codrut (Bucharest, Romania)
Hey!
On the front cover of this book there's an "American Cinematographer" quote saying: "The 5 C's of Cinematography is one of the three most important books on cinematic technique ever published." So, what about the others two? I suspect one of them is John Altons' "Painting with Light". What about the third?
I find these classic books on filmmaking realy great, that's why the answer to that quote interests me. Thanks!
