Digital Negative

You all know I love Stu Maschwitz's DV Rebel's Guide, but here's an alternative perspective on his idea of digital negative. Digital negative means thinking of shooting not as a WYSIWYG process but as the process of capturing digital information. In this case, the scope is as important as the viewfinder—you capture as rich a set of data as you can without clipping and then color in post. So what you see in the viewfinder may look washed out and dreary, but in the long run, you have a nice set of data to manipulate.

Certainly this is technically valid but I wonder how much this approach affects the performance value of shooting? In other words, as someone running the camera, and as someone who's considering the performative value of lighting, effects and everything else, I need to gauge the performances simultaneously. It's something like monitoring for audio. If you give your singer a dry signal, they'll sing one way. If you give them a wet signal, they'll sing another.

You can say I'm a remarkably poor visualizer or that I'm concerned with a certain kind of performance. Either way, I want to see how the shadow is affecting an actor's face, or how the color is setting a mood. The performance, as I've said before, isn't something that only actors do. For me, film is an ensemble performance that needs to be directed (to a certain extent) simultaneously.