what happened to locked down shots?

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pwyll

Active member
They seem to have all but disappeared from high-end narrative productions. If the camera isn't swooping in on a crane, it's crawling around on a dolly, handheld, steadicam whatever. Sometimes dramatic, sometimes subtle but almost always moving.

Is this a case of "we can so we will", or a way of allowing big-budget productions to set themselves apart from the crowd, or the development of a new aesthetic?
 
I'm not just talking Babel, Children of men, Bourne, Private Ryan etc etc. where the camera work is featured front and center....

did you see any of the HBO John Adams miniseries? $100 million production, certainly not striving for a "modern" aesthetic - but the camera is never still. Same even with the BBC period dramas

it seems to me a modern development - really gaining ground the last couple of years
 
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This "new aesthetic" of the constantly roaming camera is just the next logical step in the shortening on the viewer's already short attention span. Sitting in a theater, watching the camera work in the Bourne Identity gave me a headache that I couldn't get rid of for hours.

Directors today constantly move the camera because they are afraid to compose a picture and let the action play within it once in a while. It is the same reasoning behind shooting with multiple cameras and doing dozens of takes, directors are wimps today about having enough coverage, they are too afraid to setup a scene, shoot it and move on. I am not against moving the camera, I just hate when it is overused, it loses all effectiveness. Moving the camera is no different than any other filmmaking trick, if it used correctly and at the right moment, it is devistatingly effective. If it's used all of the time, it is so much pissing in the wind.

Dan
 
Yeah, but a lot of the beginner twilightfest entries are a series of locked-off cuts, so does that count?
 
yes that counts - but only to confirm the assertion that over the past couple of years high-end productions use locked-off shots very sparingly
 
The locked down shot goes back to the proscenium used on stage and in early silents. Ford was a silent director well before talkies came in and was therefore a master of composing a compelling shot and letting the actors do their work, entering and exiting frame.

Very few modern filmmakers have the eye to shoot compositions like this anymore. Why should they when all they want to do is pointlessly have the camera meander all over the set to satisfy audiences today that generally have the attention span of a hungry mosquito. A few modern era filmmakers could still exploit a killer composition, Kubrick, Bertolucci, Kurosawa but I have seen very few directors in the past twenty years working this way.

The funny thing is that like music, filmmaking goes back and re-invents itself, over and over. Someone smart will figure out how to intelligently compose breathtaking static compositions in the modern era, their technique will become "the new thing" and "cutting edge", doing what the greats did many decades ago.

Dan
 
Roger Deakins films generally are generally very reliant on locked off shots. Didn't seem like the camera moved much during "No Country for Old Men" at all.

And there's several different types of kinetic camera-work. Spielberg, for example, motivates camera moves in coordination with blocking actors to reframe compositions instead of cutting. Scorsese used it wonderfully in Goodfellas to "wow" the audience with gangster life and then locked the camera down for contrast at the end after Henry was arrested. Raimi went the opposite direction in Spiderman 1 where the camera started moving more and more after he became Spiderman.

One other thing to consider about big budget productions is that they use a TON of VFX. Camera movement makes them harder to do, sure, but also sells the effects to an audience 100x better than locked off shots can ever do.

Then of course, there's the TV use of just constantly having the camera move around for no reason at all.
 
Gohanto said:
Roger Deakins films generally are generally very reliant on locked off shots. Didn't seem like the camera moved much during "No Country for Old Men" at all.
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Tony Gilroy and Robert Elswit kept the camera pretty still in Michael Clayton as well. They use a lot of beautiful, static wides for dialogue scenes. Sure it has its share of moving shots as well, but it proves the art isn't dead.
 
Gohanto said:
Roger Deakins films generally are generally very reliant on locked off shots. Didn't seem like the camera moved much during "No Country for Old Men" at all.
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What I like about Deakins is he moves a lot... but at just the right times, really emphasizing the elements of action. It doesn't happen all the time which is really starting to get annoying in a lot of other movies.

What really stood out to me about Deakin's style is his camera is almost never locked down. If you watch the shots there is almost always some kind of camera movement, it's just really subtle. He is a big fan of extremely slow push ins and pull outs.

What makes me scratch my head every time though is even on the shots where there appears to be no movement at all... there is a very subtle camera bobbing going on. It's really hard to describe... at first I thought it was the film but then I read something about him always using some support from his body to stabilize the camera even when it is on a tripod in order to give a sort of breathing movement. It's beautifully delicate and organic... I recommend you go look out for it.

I certainly think that moving cameras do a lot to convey action but lately I'm starting to feel as though we depend on quick cuts and moving cameras entirely to create action movies. I look back to movies from the 70s and 80s and even films like Die Hard and I see how other elements played a part in creating that classic action movie tension. Jerky Bourne style camera work is starting to become more like a crutch than anything else. I'm glad Children of Men mixed things up a bit by adding the brutally long cuts but I'm feeling as if the style is becoming more and more saturated.
 
yes - it's the use of subtle movement that has exploded over the past 4/5 years.

Movement so subtle it goes unnoticed by most of the audience - Deakins is a big proponent of every type of camera movement from handheld on up

- if you are not aware of this stylistic development watch closely and you will discover it in a surprising number of A list productions.
 
Qzar - I would love to read that Deakins interview about breathing - any chance of a link?

Thanks
 
pwyll said:
yes - it's the use of subtle movement that has exploded over the past 4/5 years.

Movement so subtle it goes unnoticed by most of the audience - Deakins is a big proponent of every type of camera movement from handheld on up

- if you are not aware of this stylistic development watch closely and you will discover it in a surprising number of A list productions.
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And I like it. I think it takes away the completely static effect and replaces it with a very subtle "humanization" that feels like just like the right measure to me. Like you said, one is usually not even aware of it as such, which, IMHO, is always the desired effect, as opposed to the "look, ma!" effect, which is at best sophomoric and more often just plain annoying.

Otherwise, I am firmly in the "no shakycam, please" (aka the "no nausea/headaches, please") school of thought. On the other hand, many amateur filmmakers seem to have forgotten about camera movement entirely (while also being clueless as to composition), and that's almost as regrettable.

Artful movement, in appropriate places, contrasted elegantly with (relative) camera stillness, while always being mindful of an overriding compositional imperative, would describe my idea of a job done right where all this is concerned.
 
The constantly moving camera so loved by Michael Bay and pretty much every filmmaker aspiring to be Michael Bay is becoming very over-used to my taste. It seems to be a band-aid solution to films that are otherwise uncreative. Hey, I just watched Let the Right One In. A phenomenal Swedish vampire film (it's so much more than that) currently in limited release. It is being re-made by Hollywood next year. Go see the original of this film. Lots of lock off shots, and they really add to the aesthetic, because the story and performance and production design are all so beautiful. Ultimately, "moving shots" add a lot of time and expense to a budget and are so unnecessary a lot of the time. A product of too much money and not enough creativity.
 
pwyll said:
They seem to have all but disappeared from high-end narrative productions. If the camera isn't swooping in on a crane, it's crawling around on a dolly, handheld, steadicam whatever. Sometimes dramatic, sometimes subtle but almost always moving.

Is this a case of "we can so we will", or a way of allowing big-budget productions to set themselves apart from the crowd, or the development of a new aesthetic?
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I still tend to do a lot of static shots but moving shot do have more visual appeal at least to me. Also I think to many, statics make your film look less film-like (less professional would probably be a better thing to say).

-Nate
 
yes exactly - it seems like a moving frame has all of a sudden become a significant part of "film-look"

lets face facts folks most of the time "film-look" = "high-budget look"
 
I would also add the seeming lost art of smooth tilts and pans on a fluid or geared head. Lock off can start locked off and eventually lead to one of these moves. Or the opposite.

I wish Children of Men had been shot Steadicam instead of handheld. The long takes and the complex timing and choreography were brilliant but the handheld camera just screams "Hey, I'm a camera being carried by an operator!" If it had been meant to be "subjective cam" then they needed to establish the character whose eyes we are suddenly seeing the world through. Blood on the lens may have seemed like a great creative idea but all it said to me was "oh there's fake blood on the lens of the camera." We're not supposed to think about a camera!

Anyway my point is that Steadicam sometimes replaces the dolly which glides through fictitious worlds unnoticed.
 
Jim - the moves I am talking about are often exactly what you describe: "smooth tilts and pans on a fluid or geared head."

As for CoM, I respectfully disagree. But we are both in good company:

"Lubezki says he and Cuaron had two major disagreements on their approach to the picture. The first had to do with Steadicam. "In my mind,I wanted to do a combination of handheld and Steadicam, because I think if you shoot everything handheld (the technique) loses its power. In my dream, Children of Men was going o be 60 percent Steadicam; with a good operator, it doesn't look mechanical. But on the first day of shooting, we did five takes with the Steadicam, and then Cuaron said, 'Take away the Steadicam, we'll do it handheld'. After that the Steadicam stayed in the truck, and every day I tried to put it up, until Cuaron said, 'Chivo forget the Steadicam. We're never going to use it.' One of the things I don't like about handheld is that when you're trying to concentrate on a person's face in a wide shot, you lose definition because there's motion blur. It drives me crazy, because I want to be able to focus on the actor's eyes."
-American cinematographer 12/06
 
jimpatro said:
If it had been meant to be "subjective cam" then they needed to establish the character whose eyes we are suddenly seeing the world through.
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I've heard this rule before, but never understood a reason to follow it. Most of the best uses in style come from a subjective telling of the story and that obviously isn't limited to only the POV shots in the film.
Should Scorsese have only used jump cuts on the POV shots from Henry Hill in the last part of Goodfellas?
Should Arronofsky not have shot Sara Goldfarb with a Fisheye lens in Requiem for a Dream?
All of Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas is very subjectively shot.
One of my favorite shots in Titanic is one distant, static shot of the ship on the ocean, then the camera jumps back and going straight into handhand, kenetic style as everyone's trying to get off the boat. Basically getting a quick objective shot, then going back to a subjective style based around every passanger's goal to no die in the water.

The most important thing to consider, imo, is simply how you want to present the story to the audience. You can add subjective effects to every camera angle, just to the POV shots, none at all, or anywhere inbetween. Then of course there's always style for the story's sake and not the characters (Star Wars comes to mind), or plain and simply style for styles sake like Ocean's trilogy.
 
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