Reddit reviews The Visual Story, Second Edition: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media

Here are a few:
http://www.amazon.com/Set-Lighting-Technicians-Handbook-Distribution/dp/0240810759

http://www.amazon.com/Cinematography-Theory-Practice-Cinematographers-Directors/dp/0240812093

http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Cinematography-Fundamentals-Techniques-Workflows/dp/0240817915/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1410971724&sr=1-1&keywords=david+stump+ASC

http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Story-Creating-Structure-Digital/dp/0240807790/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1410971760&sr=1-1&keywords=the+visual+story

Off the top of my head, a few books/resources that I found helpful/inspiring:

• Cinematography (Screencraft Series)
  
  
• FilmCraft: Cinematography
  
  
• A Man With a Camera (already recommended it to a different person on this subreddit)
  
  
• The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media (not strictly about cinematography, but great resource for learning visual "rules", in order to know how to break them later)
  
  
• David Mamet: On Directing Film (yes it's about directing, but Mamet also focuses on what's important about the story and how to tell it.)
  
  
• American Cinematographer subscription
  
  
  Also, watch (a lot of) films multiple times, pay attention how stories are told visually, analyze them and figure out what works and what doesn't work (for you).

someone listed a bunch of titles ive read/bought for school a few comments up. try asking around some colleges for students looking to sell back their books after finals!

EDIT: i feel bad for not posting any actual titles i had. this book was awesome, very enlightening. all interview transcripts of steven spielberg regarding movies, various points in time. http://www.amazon.com/Steven-Spielberg-Interviews-Conversations-Filmmakers/dp/157806113X

I bought bruce blocks book before i got into film school, read it, highlighted it while waiting for flights, etc. then, sure enough, one of my teachers assigned the book to us. i felt like a king!
http://www.amazon.com/The-Visual-Story-Creating-Structure/dp/0240807790

same situation with blain browns book. except he eventually taught one of my classes. :P slightly different subject, but it was cool having read a book, then not only meeting the author, but taking his class. :)
http://smile.amazon.com/Cinematography-Theory-Practice-Cinematographers-Directors/dp/0240812093/ref=sr_1_55?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1425434291&sr=1-55&keywords=visual+storytelling

https://www.amazon.com/Filmmakers-Eye-Learning-Cinematic-Composition/dp/0240812174/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1502971148&sr=8-1&keywords=filmmaker%27s+eye

https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Story-Creating-Structure-Digital/dp/0240807790/ref=pd_sim_14_10?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0240807790&pd_rd_r=C197QEE8EMEY1KGN3N2E&pd_rd_w=PKzWC&pd_rd_wg=vF29K&psc=1&refRID=C197QEE8EMEY1KGN3N2E

https://www.amazon.com/Cinematography-Directors-Guide-Creative-Collaboration/dp/1932907556/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502971260&sr=1-10&keywords=cinematography

The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media by Bruce Block

http://www.amazon.com/The-Visual-Story-Creating-Structure/dp/0240807790

You gotta have Bruce Block, that's where it all started for me! Everything you need to know about filmmaking in terms of it as a visual language. Super vital no matter what area of film you go into, in my opinion :)

This was one of the books that helped me transition from doing this as a hobby to doing this professionally in the industry.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Visual-Story-Creating-Structure/dp/0240807790

Note: Obviously this list is incomplete, if anyone has suggestions please add to this. Also this list is not specifically for kevleemur, but for anyone looking to learn about movie stuffs

Online material is nice, but there are many great and more reliable resources that come in these old fashioned book things.

General

Shot by Shot

MasterShots

The Visual Story


Directing

On Screen Directing
(may be hard to find)

On Directing Film by David Manet

Cinematography/ Lighting/ Camera/ On Set Learning

The ASC Manual (some earlier editions come in one volume which is nice)

Creative Control by Michael Hofstein

The Set Lighting Technicians Handbook

Painting With Light (John Alton's book. A little outdated but still a good read).

Reflections

The Bare Bones Camera Course for Film and Video by Tom Schroeppel (very simple, a good start)

The Grip Book

The Camera Assistant's Manual

Cinematography: Theory and Practice



Producing

Creative Producing From A to Z by Myrl A Schreibman

Scheduling and Budgeting Your Film by Paula Landry

Editing

In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch (Sound designer and editor from Apocalypse Now----EXCELLENT)



Screenwriting

Story

Screenplay the Foundations of Screenwriting






ONLINE RESOURCES:


http://www.rondexter.com/

http://cinematography.net/

http://www.rogerdeakins.com/

http://www.arri.com/

http://www.mole.com/

http://www.panavision.com/home

http://www.filmtools.com/

Aside from familiarizing yourself with knowledge and technique the best you can without being involved on set, one of the best things you can do is read up and become as knowledgeable as you can with gear that you will eventually encounter, which is why I listed the last four links. Even if you do plan on going into producing or directing, it is always helpful to understand lighting and camera and why the people working with you need the things they do.


GO LEARN THINGS!

This book is a good start:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Visual-Story-Creating-Structure/dp/0240807790/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1395689894&sr=8-1&keywords=the+visual+story

Also these are great and easy to return to when storyboarding:

http://www.amazon.com/Master-Shots-Vol-2nd-Techniques/dp/1615930876/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1395690041&sr=8-1&keywords=master+shots

http://www.amazon.com/Master-Shots-Volume-Shooting-Dialogue/dp/1615930558/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1395690059&sr=8-3&keywords=master+shots

http://www.amazon.com/Cinematic-Storytelling-Powerful-Conventions-Filmmaker/dp/193290705X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1395690130&sr=8-1&keywords=cinematic+storytelling

Swear I'm not an Amazon affiliate, just love me these books. They're worth reading twice.

One of my grad school professors was a producer on this film, and is very into visual storytelling. Here's one of his books - highly recommended!

This is a great reinforcement of some basic principals of eye-trace that have consciously been used in film since the early 20th century.

Bruce Block covers all the principals that attract the viewer's gaze in this text. The whole book is a good read for aspiring filmmakers; its basically a summation of principals that date back to renaissance painting combined with Eisenstein's montage theories.

Edit: I'm in no way affiliated with Mr. Block. Just a fan of his work.

The Visual Story by Bruce Block is pretty good for the basics of film language. It's commonly used in film schools.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0240807790/ref=cm_sw_r_awd_rAF9ub0CCKZ0X

Pick up this book.

My favorites:

The Visual Story


In the Blink of an Eye

How to Read a Film (personally bored by it but a lot of film classes I took in uni versity used it)

The Filmmaker's Eye (huge fan of this book)

The rest of this post is just general advice on how to gain a deeper knowledge of film.

If you want to learn the grammar of film, read about film history (it will help introduce you to editing/camera movement/directing techniques and the filmmakers/films that influenced your favorite directors).

Read criticism from Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, David Bordwell (his blog is a fantastic resource), Jonathan Rosenbaum, and older critics such as Bazin/Eisenstein. There are more out there, but this is a good start.

Read reviews after you watch a film instead of beforehand--those reviews will hopefully give you a deeper view of the film. That being said, you really have to look around to figure out who you like, stylistically speaking. There are a lot of critics that have no idea what they're talking about from a technical standpoint. If you're bored with short reviews without substance you might like FILMCRITHULK.

Watch YouTube tutorials and video essays on filmmaking. Video essays are particularly helpful at illustrating and pointing out things that you might not have noticed otherwise. It's also a hell of a lot more entertaining than reading criticism that was written in 1962 in another language.

From a practical standpoint, pick up a camera and shoot something. Edit it. Read books on composition--I've found that photography composition books are pretty helpful. Read scripts from films you love and films you haven't seen to get an idea of how a film exists before the first day of shooting takes place.

Keep watching films, and watch them actively. Don't text during films, and try to watch them in one sitting. The goal is to immerse yourself in the image and analyze the shots/cuts/etc. as they happen. Watch films with commentaries, watch them with the sound off, and branch out into different genres and time periods so that you can attain a more concise view of film.

Above all else, watch as many films as you can. You'll find that the watchlist keeps growing, no matter how many films you see.

Hey, while not directly a VFX book, I highly recommend reading this book, The Visual Story, by Bruce Block. I actually took his class back when I was in SC, and I think it's one of my hidden weapons that has given me an edge as a VFX Supervisor. Basically, it's all about how we perceive images on a 2D screen, and the chapters on Depth Cues would help you a lot here.


https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Story-Creating-Structure-Digital/dp/0240807790/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1494700999&sr=8-1&keywords=the+visual+story

Here's my take on where you can go, from back to forward:

1. Lens: I see you attempting to do some hazing, this is great, and indeed a depth cue, but the scale and focal length of your mountains seem off, which is throwing off the depth. The BG mountains look like they were shot on a really long lens, from far away, so they flatten out. But you're water and overall landscape feels like you want a wide angle lens shot. So you should shrink these mountains down considerably.
   
   
2. Haze. I think you could push your overall haze a little further the deeper you go back. You could even do with some haze over your FG mountains. Especially at you contact point with the water. It looks better on the camera right side, where you have some white wash, anything you can do to get your FG mountains and water to connect better liike that will make them feel less cut out.
   
   
3. Composition, take those two mountains just off center, stacked on one another, and move one or the other camera left or right so they're not so pyramidal-ly on top of each other. This will lead to some better composition.
   
   
4. You may want to consider replacing your FG mountains as well. Your mountain types are very different from each other in terms of type and foliage, and these FG ones stand out pretty bad, you're also hard cutting in too the trees
   
   
5. Someone mentioned focus. If you're going for a wide angle lens, you wouldn't have shallow DOF, but if you shoot wide open aperture (which you always are in cinema) then you would have softening at infinity. So assuming your ship is much closer to us, you could do with an overall soften on the mountains, and a ramped soften on the water the further you go back.
   
   
6. Assuming your ship is moving, consider adding motion blur, on a regular shutter it would never be that in focus. Also some heat trails coming off the engines, and fire blasters from an X-Wing.
   
   
7. Consider moving the ship closer to camera, more interesting composition. On top of that, possibly consider some FG clouds or something just to add even more depth and composition.
   
   
8. Consider a slight reflection of the ship off the water.
   
   
9. Overall you need color and luma balancing across the board. You need to match your black and white levels on everything. I think your BG mountains are the best integrated to the sky, so look at the whites in there, then look at the whites on your X-wing, they don't match color or luma. You're way to dark on the ship and have too much red and not enough magenta. Likewise your ship is far away enough to have the atmosphere start hitting it, so your blacks are too black. There's tons of tutorials on youtube for color matching.
   
   
10. This is not a note, but I also recommend getting frame grabs of the latest starwars, or looking up stills of wide open environments. If you're not familiar with camera and photography, get familiar. That is the #1 thing that surprises me in VFX these days - lack of camera knowledge. In CG and 2D you can break all the rules and make impossible cameras. But generally you don't want to unless you are doing it intentionally. Like anything, you need to know and understand the rules before you can break them. Right now you have an impossible camera and it's probably frustrating to you that things feel cut out and don't quite click together. If you looked at this again and said, I want this to be a 24mm 35mm sized frame, shot wide open on a 180 degree shutter, you'd catch things like motion blur, depth cues, scale issues, etc.
    
    Hope this info helps!
    
    
    

I'm a little late to the party but I recommend

Cinematography - Blain Brown

The Visual Story - Bruce Block

The Visual Story may seem more focused on directing the cinematography, and maybe thats true, but when I'm looking to hire a DP, I want to know they understand how to tell a story visually as much as I do.

I've read pretty much all of the books referenced here and I would say The Visual Story:
http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Story-Second-Creating-Structure/dp/0240807790

Nothing else provided as much useful information about how to make a good movie as this for me.

Good question. I don't quite know how to start. So this may be a bit random.


SOUND/MUSIC - Back when I used to edit a lot, if there was music, I always would edit to the beat. It just made sense to me. If there isn't music, a sound effect can bring a transition to life. Like a whoosh or something. Even a straight cut from one scene to the other, it's common practice to allow sound from the second scene to start before the cut.



RHYTHM - It needs to go along with the rhythm of the visuals and the rhythm of the audio, even if the audio is just voice over. If the transition is some kind of wipe with multiple elements, all those elements have a visual rhythm.



CONSISTENCY - A simple transition carried out consistently is better than many complex transitions that are not related. It you are going to do many complex transitions, they should have an underlying concept in common. Also, they should be consistent with the project as a whole.



MOVEMENT - If doing a cut, pay attention to the movement from the first scene as compared to the second scene. If doing a wipe transition, look how the movement of the wipe interact with the movement of the two scenes.



FRAMING - Keep in mind the focus of the scenes and how the transition moves the viewer's eye.



Well, those are some ideas I had. I hope they get your own ideas going. There is a lot of resources out there about visual theory. Like The Visual Story

My favorite is still The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media

It gives you wonderful knowledge that let's you create truly powerful images.

The Visual Story by Bruce Block
The Visual Story