Great Camera Work - Ice Dancing

[Mark Williams]

[ahalpert]

That's awesome. A very liberating experience to watch. I wonder how much rehearsal there was and how much the operator was simply able to react by instinct

[puredrifting]

For safety, this had to have been 100% tightly rehearsed. While this looks really cool, the whole time I was reacting like a TD, cutting in my mind to overhead,
tripod shot medium, wide, then back to the drone. I'm not a fan of the oner. It works better in cinema where a scene can be written so that the "oner-ness" has a story
reason to exist. This shot is a technical achivement, a great one but it's fatiguing to watch without it ever relenting.

It's the same issue I have with VR, cool tech but it discards the visual language of cinema and television. I need my wide, medium, CU, reverse, reaction shots.
Oners are mainly for other techno nerds to ooh and aah because they are difficult to achieve, but they are mainly a show off move.

[ahalpert]

I disagree almost completely. One thought I had while watching it was how much better I could appreciate the movement and how much closer I felt to the action than if they were constantly cutting and displacing me. I agree that they could have flown back a bit sometimes and done a more slow-moving wide, or even from above. Just for a change of pace and so we're not constantly swirling.

But I do a lot of work with a dance photographer/videographer and I sent her the clip right away after watching it.

There's a utilitarian aspect to dance photography of just communicating the choreography to someone who wasn't there (or couldn't sit that close). so, you never really need/want to go closer than a full-body shot. If you focus on the face, you're missing what the body is doing - which is the main point of it all. and if you cut from angle to angle, you lose a clarity of the sense of movement between places.

I think that as a piece of dance videography, this absolutely knocked it out of the park.

The one surprising thing is that after all that careful planning, they had no plan for what to do at the end lol and the guy skates away and eventually you have a lame tilt-up that could have come sooner and more decisively

[Bassman2003]

Thanks for posting. I enjoyed the feel of it and agree with both Dan and Abe. My favorite part was the sound of the skates on the ice! That is where the rubber meets the road so to speak and often times this gets lost in translation vs being there.

I want to have a good reason to own a drone as I like them, but I just have not come across it yet. So many places I would want to use it for money are venues and they would not allow one. So it is always 'cool, but no money' for me. Maybe someday...

[Peter C.]

That's not filmed with a drone.

[Alvise Tedesco]

https://www.oniceperspectives.com/about
Very cool!

[Mark Williams]

Sorry, I found it in a drone forum, my bad.

[puredrifting]

Still the same issues although that's a heck of lot safer than using a drone.

I've shot quite a few dance films, won a few dance film festivals, all in the era before the gimbal and drone were the thing, we used Steadicam ops for some but the key to me is more cameras/angles.
I'm the opposite. I guess if I was a dancer or skater I would love the oner because it's pure and you can see everything, but for entertainment value for a general audience, oners get boring pretty quickly because
like this one, it's all one pace, but maybe that's just me? Just like shootinga a fight sequence, I like the cinematic cheats, I'm not going for realism. For me, the fight sequences and wire work in Crouching
Tiger or the boxing sequences in Raging Bull are much more entertaining and interesting than all of the "realistic" fight sequences with far fewer cuts and no "cheats". It's cinema, not documentary. This
sequence is more documentary in approach and I can appreciate that at a level, I guess?

I'm usually pretty opinionated about art/cinema and my opinions are often completely the opposite of most people, I'm definitely not usually in lock step with what's popular
and what most people like, find interesting or boring.

[Bassman2003]

Interesting or boring is a matter of engagement with the audience. If you are somewhat connected to dance or even know the performer, a video probably does not need to be as flashy to keep your attention. What I have learned with shooting dance for many years is that I do not have to follow the 'cut every five seconds to keep the audience awake to get to the next ad' model that most sports on network television support. Yes, that is generalized but overall, so much of sports editing we see has been surrounded with selling advertising. It has been refreshing to see some sports on pay models where the presentation is not so over the top.

Having said that, I lost focus after a little while in the original video. That guy is using some pretty heavy copyrighted material in his videos.