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Figure 7.24
A “lower third” is a title that identifies an interview subject used in television shows and documentaries. Remember the text must fall within the “title safe” guidelines. The figure on the left looks fine, but when a lower third is added, it becomes apparent that the subject is framed too tightly.
Breaking the Rules
In Western culture, our ideas about good framing are heavily dependent on the tradition of fine art painting. The shape of the film and video frame is similar to that of a traditional landscape painting, and the concept of how a medium close-up should be framed is similar to a traditional portrait. Breaking from these traditions can be interesting and exciting when it looks intentional, but beware: it can be disastrous when it looks like you didn’t know any better.
Camera Movement
As if composition weren’t complex enough, we’re now going to complicate things and consider camera movement. Pans, tilts, zooms, dollies, and other types of camera movement are important parts of the language of film. (See Chapter 5, “Planning Your Shoot,” for definitions of types of shots.) As with composition and editing, good camera movement is something that you don’t always notice when you’re watching a movie. When planning your shots, your goal is simply to create movements that will allow you to cover the action in your scene in an elegant, attractive manner.
Panning and Tilting
Pans and tilts are movements around the camera’s axes. When you swivel the camera from side to side around its center, you are panning the camera. When you swivel it up and down around its center, you are tilting the camera. These are the most common camera movements you’ll
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make, especially if your camera is locked down on a tripod. Like most camera moves, good pans and tilts are smooth and slow, never jarring or sudden. They always start with a static image and eventually come to rest on a static image, even if these static parts of the shot are edited out later on.
Zooms and Dolly Shots
These types of shots use movement that goes forward and backward along the Z-axis. We’ve already discussed zooms and techniques for zooming earlier in this chapter. It’s important to know that, aesthetically, zooms are considered the low-rent cousin of dolly shots. Dollying the camera means to move it closer or farther from the subject. The feeling is similar to walking through space, rather than simply magnifying it. When you zoom the camera, you change the sense of depth in your scene, which results in the objects in your scene appearing to have a different spatial relationship to one another. Consequently, dolly shots usually appear more natural. Dolly shots require a camera dolly or some type of wheeled conveyance. Therefore, if you really need to pull off a good dolly shot, you’ll want to rent some extra gear.
Tracking Shots
Tracking shots are akin to dolly shots, in that you physically move the camera, but tracking shots are used to follow action, or to create a camera movement parallel to the action within the scene, such as following a car by shooting from another car. As with dolly shots, you’ll need some type of wheeled camera dolly to create a tracking shot.
Practice Camera Movements
Even if your script isn’t ready, you can still practice the use of a moving camera. Choose some mundane actions—a person opens a letter and reacts to the contents while sitting down in a chair—and practice shooting with different types of camera movements. Try some versions of this shot with multiple angles, and then try editing them together so that you can get a feel for how moving shots can be pieced together.
Handholding
Traditionally, handheld shots were used in documentaries because it’s easier to capture unscripted events when the cameraperson isn’t bogged down by a tripod. In features, this verité style of shooting is often used intentionally to give a raw, documentary feeling that implies that the camera operator was involved in the scene. Think of dramatic footage you’ve seen on the news where the cameraperson starts running without turning off the camera, in an obvious attempt to escape personal danger. Even big budget movies occasionally have their camera operators handhold shots to capture moments of extreme action or violence. In the hands of a skilled operator, a handheld shot can be indistinguishable from a shot on a tripod, but a wobbly handheld camera draws attention to itself and makes the audience question whether the event was real or fictional (think Blair Witch Project). Nowadays, handheld cameras have additional meaning within the lexicon of visual literacy. Thanks to “reality” TV shows, homevideo TV shows, and amateur news footage, we’ve learned to see handheld shots as amateur, caught-on-tape verité footage. As more and more people shoot more and more video, the lines between real and fictional, professional and amateur continue to blur.
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Handheld shots often imply a point-of-view change. If you use a tripod to shoot a scene of a scared person walking fearfully through a dark, deserted house, the audience will feel like they’re simply watching that action. If you shoot the same scene handheld, though, the audience will feel like they’re watching the action from the point of view of someone else—probably someone rather unsavory. This can greatly heighten the tension in your scene. Switching from locked down to handheld is often a way of switching the viewer’s perspective from outside the action to inside, from objective to subjective.
Handholding a lightweight video camera can be a challenge. Some prefer to hold the camera at waist level, balanced against their torso; others prefer holding it at eye level. You can also use the shoulder strap to try to steady the camera, while standing with your legs shoulderwidth apart to help steady your stance. As with most camera-operating skills, practice makes perfect. Handholding a medium-sized 16mm film camera or a professional video camera is actually a little easier because the weight of the camera helps the operator hold it steady. Many gear-laden 35mm and HD cameras are not designed for handholding at all, and projects that use these cameras often use a secondary camera for any handheld shots.
In many ways, the camera operator who handholds is free from the restrictions that others face when using tripods, dollies, jibs, and steadicams. But there are many challenges as well. Perhaps one of the most difficult things to shoot handheld is a subject who “walks and talks.” Generally, the camera operator must get in front of the subject and walk backward, shooting the subject as they walk toward them. Believe it or not, skilled handheld operators can shoot footage in this manner that looks fluid and smooth. One trick of the trade is for the camera operator to match his stride to that of the subject. Not only does this ensure that the camera operator walks at the same pace, but it also ensures that the bobbing motion of a camera matches the bobbing motions of the subject. The result is that the subject’s head stays in approximately the same place within the frame, which makes the footage appear “smoother” and less jarring than it would if the camera were moving up and down out of sync with the subject.
Practice Handholding
Video cameras are pretty easy to come by these days. If you don’t own one yourself, you can probably borrow one from a friend or your school or your office. Start out by learning how to hold the camera steady by picking a static object and shooting it. The longer the shot, the harder it is to hold the camera without shaking. Next, try panning, zooming, and following moving objects—cars, your cat, birds, or airplanes in the sky. Try to make each pan part of a composed shot that starts and ends. Remember to keep the center of gravity in your body low, even if your arms are holding a camera pointed up overhead. Sometimes, slightly bending your knees helps. If your camera has electronic image stabilization, try shooting both with and without it.
WHAT TO WATCH
The Blair Witch Project is famous for its use of handheld camera shots. This gives a limited point of view, which made for a much scarier film.
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Shooting for the Web
It used to be that shooting video for the Web required a lot of care to avoid compression artifacts. Today, thanks to high-quality codecs, such as H.264, that’s no longer the case. If you’ve ever watched a movie trailer on the Internet, you know how good video on the Web can look. If small file size is an absolute must, though, try to limit the amount of motion in your image (both subject and camera motion), and stay away from sets and locations with lots of different colors and lots of fine detail. These will all contribute to the size of your final file.
Deciding When to Move
Choosing when to use a camera movement can be tricky. Not only do moving shots require special gear (dollies, cranes, jibs, steadicams, and so on) and a skilled cameraman, they can also be challenging to work with in the editing room. Editing moving shots into static shots, or moving shots that travel in different directions or at different speeds, can be difficult and may result in scenes that lack the emotional tone you were looking for.
A camera movement is usually used for two reasons:
1.It’s the only way to get the shot. Sometimes, the decision to use a moving shot is obvious, as it’s the only way to cover the action in your scene. If you’re having trouble blocking your scene because you can’t keep it all framed from one camera position, then try some very simple camera movements. Often, even a short tracking movement is all you need to get the camera into a new position that frames the rest of your action.
2.A moving camera changes the level of tension in a scene. Think of the extremely tense moments in a soap opera. A character has just learned some horrible news, and we’re getting ready to break for a commercial. The music builds, the actor looks traumatized, and what happens? The camera slowly zooms into their face. (Never ever zoom for this type of effect. Dolly the camera in instead.) Camera movements are not just used to create tension, they can also be used to release tension. A swirling camera movement that circles two excited lovers as they finally embrace and kiss on a crowded street corner at rush hour can be a tremendous release of tension (since they were probably on the outs just a few scenes earlier).
It is possible to move the camera too much. A scene of an intimate private discussion between two people may not be served by lots of camera movements. In fact, the moving camera may simply distract the audience and upstage the action happening on-screen.
A well-conceived camera movement will be invisible to the viewer, which makes it hard to learn from skilled directors, because you simply won’t notice their best work. Nevertheless, studying and practicing camera movements are the best ways to learn how to use them.
Corporate and industrial works usually benefit tremendously from moving cameras. Because these types of productions often include lots of footage of mundane actions, spicing up your shots with some nice camerawork not only allows you to show the same mundane actions in different ways, but it can also inject a lot of visual energy into what might be dry material. Next time you have to shoot an office worker talking on the phone or filing, consider renting a small jib or dolly and try shooting them a little more dynamically.