Shots Falling Flat? Watch This Video to Find Ways to Add Depth to Your Scenes

+5 Totally pointless and distracting

you're right in the sense that technically f22 gives a "deeper" DOF, but what this video is referring to is the depth experienced by the viewer and not the depth of the focus. f1.4 will give a much shallower DOF, isolating the subject and giving the illusion that the background further away, hence the "depth."

JPS, your post is spoken as a perfect example of the internet camera man and I'm sorry, a small swipe at what "my" current works will produce seems to suggest I've hit a nerve. I'm sorry but you have the components of depth confused with shallow depth of field and what the art department would bring to the film.

To the Underwater Realms credit they did disclaim that they are not experts but you seem to be defending what they showed as tactics to create depth and I'm sorry but any DP that has studied cinematography and not just pushed record on a 5D would know they have this wrong. In fact most of there examples are tools designed to reduce depth. Tip 1, depth of field, they have this backwards at F1.4 the background is a single mushy plane, its a level shot and she's essentially a person standing in front of a painting, there is no depth here. Tip 2 Backlighting, backlighting is not a depth cue, it does do everything she is talking about but there are no depth in the shot and this shot is flat, Tip 3, foreground, technically sound but the actual shot had no overlap between the actors, the foreground element was extremely out of focus and is now a diminished depth cue. Tip 4 Perspective, this is actually right! and if they paid attention to there own advice they would see that the first example of a flat background is exactly what is happening with the wide aperture on the other tips. Tip 5 Parallax is correct, camera movement is a depth cue. Tip 6 Aerial diffusion is essentially what they are talking about and this shot has depth because of the perspective lines and deep depth of field but the talent is standing in front of the only corner that we can see in the garage which is reducing depth and then they add diffusion, diffusion by its self reduces depth, think of a foggy day and a bright summers day and ask yourself can you see more or less depth when you look down the road on either of these days, i would hazard to guess that we can see less on a foggy day no?. They had more depth in the interview shots presenting the video than most of the examples.

Citizen Cane used deep depth of field in combination with low or high camera angles that are mostly off centre (up to 45 degrees) in order to cue 2 and 3 point perspective in to the shot as well as deep staging with the actors blocking, multiple planes via lighting and as i said even split diopters to give an apparent F60+ depth of filed to some of the shots.

When thinking of depth remember the classic train track shot, at the horizon line the tracks appear to converge on each other and in fact look like they get smaller in the distance, we know thats not the case, it is a "depth cue", when photographed you are looking at a 2D version of this but it still appears to have depth?, however the rules of cinematography (and yes there are rules) dictate that anything out of focus become flat, hence that if you use a shallow depth of field and put the background extremely out of focus you are moving towards eliminating depth cues and not enhancing them. Everything you think created depth in Citizen Cane (set direction, art department etc) would not have helped increase the depth cues if the DP had not shot that picture with an aim to use Deep Space and deep depth of field in the first place, to your credit, it wouldn't have looked half as great as it does if they hadn't worked on the set direction to balance the deep focus shots.

Now "my" film is not my film, i am the DP, its the directors and producers film. The director who understands flat and deep space wants a certain character who's true motive is hidden until the final scenes captured in flat space but once our main star figures her out the cinematography will move to deep space and we will use multiple planes, perspective lines, overlap, parallax etc to enhance the deep space around her, now the rest of the film is shot in deep space so that her scenes stand out, this is called contrast. We have 8 weeks of preproduction for the art department to make sure that the deep space shots look fantastic and that the background can be varied on the flat space shots.

Just read up on the subject, we all get it wrong at some point but its useless arguing with someone unless you know what you're talking about and are not just relaying the same info that the video is saying, you can call it psychological depth all you like but if the image is flat it isn't going to have depth cues and hence no actual depth, it would be down to the actor alone to portray this psychological depth you mentioned, maybe thats what you want maybe not but you have to understand the difference between deep and flat space is in order to make that decision and unfortunately a large part of the DSLR crowd are more worried about bit rates and sensor size these days than true cinematic skills. Ask the average DSLR user whats cinematic and they will say 24p, 2.35:1, colour grading and quote you lines like "filmic", please don't be one of those people, read the books or join the schools but either way don't be a sheep ;0)