what happened to locked down shots?

I agree with your points. But I think maybe guerilla style has made the leap to mainstream films. Shooting everything handheld makes for less setup time on sticks, less time doing true storyboarding, less time lighting. All a boon to low budget, quick and dirty filmmaking. A style borne of necessity. But using it on decently budgeted films is like outlining every actors eyes with dark makeup. Heck, I've seen plenty of indie stuff that somehow resisted the urge to go handheld. On big budget you can afford to plant on sticks, create finely detailed composition and choreography in storyboards, design intricate lighting.

Children of Men handheld just says to me "we're gonna wow 'em with the dynamic of this handheld stuff". But my suspension of dis-belief went out the window with some of the shots. Too too many action oriented films show sticks can work and work well. And there is much handheld footage that doesn't even look handheld or at the very least doesn't call attention to itself.

A director has the freedom to use techniques as he/she seems fit but the audience is free to dislike the choices made.
 
Personally I'm not taken out of the story by handheld camerawork, but to each his own.

Fell across this ASC article on the evolution of camera movement and though it was interesting...
http://www.theasc.com/magazine/oct03/sub/index.html

When I think about aggressive handheld camerawork, a lot of people look to Bourne and Greengrass as the devil, but consider Greengrass's use of handheld cameras in United 93. Shooting that film on sticks, steadicam, or dolly simply wouldn't have had nearly the same impact as watching that through rough, bumpy handheld cameras. And interestingly enough, someone else filmed the same story going with the dolly and tripod route... it's called Flight 93.
 
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The film that made the Hollywood Honchos salivate over Greengrass was Bloody Sunday. Like it or not the Bourne franchise grossed over a billion dollars.

But edgy hand-held work is only one aspect of the modern moving frame bonanza. Check out HBO's John Adams - cost over $100 million to make, and every shot is a moving shot. In JA the moving shots added enormously to the cost

- all the more surprising really when the target audience was well up in age

Gohanto: thanks for the link, very interesting
 
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Gohanto said:
or plain and simply style for styles sake like Ocean's trilogy.
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Ocean's 13 drove me nuts for this exact reason. I was literally yelling at the screen (the plasma, at home, thank you). The 'underlit' effect was so distracting it pretty much ruined the entire film for me.

:violent5:
 
Gohanto said:
When I think about aggressive handheld camerawork, a lot of people look to Bourne and Greengrass as the devil, but consider Greengrass's use of handheld cameras in United 93. Shooting that film on sticks, steadicam, or dolly simply wouldn't have had nearly the same impact as watching that through rough, bumpy handheld cameras.
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Haven't seen it, but I agree. If the *desired* effect is a chaotic, bumpy, inside-of-the-washing-machine effect, then yeah. Grab that camera by the horns and let 'er rip. But only while that effect is called for, which almost certainly should not be the entire film.

Bourne Ultimatum-style relentless shakycam, even in simple, otherwise calm dialog 2-shots for heaven's sake, seems to me to be an almost pure example of filmmakers' conceit.

Barf...

Literally...
 
Me personally I hate lockdown shoots, especially wider lock down shoots. I love close ups especially ecus with subtle movement, to me they add realism to the scene and tension to scene. The subtle movement to me makes it feel like the camera itself is apart of the scene, like its another human in the room and we're looking in from their prospective.
 
Ted Spencer said:
Haven't seen it, but I agree. If the *desired* effect is a chaotic, bumpy, inside-of-the-washing-machine effect, then yeah. Grab that camera by the horns and let 'er rip. But only while that effect is called for, which almost certainly should not be the entire film.

Bourne Ultimatum-style relentless shakycam, even in simple, otherwise calm dialog 2-shots for heaven's sake, seems to me to be an almost pure example of filmmakers' conceit.

Barf...

Literally...
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I second that Barf.
 
lhmaloney said:
Me personally I hate lockdown shoots, especially wider lock down shoots. I love close ups especially ecus with subtle movement, to me they add realism to the scene and tension to scene. The subtle movement to me makes it feel like the camera itself is apart of the scene, like its another human in the room and we're looking in from their prospective.
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I'll throw a wrench here, I'm not saying either technique is right or wrong but.....

The human brain compensates for a lot of movement and shakiness. When you run, jump,lie sideways and watch TV. All of that commotion is removed,so when you do handheld/shaky camera work that is not realistic of a human perceives it. So handheld creates an illusion of POV of a third person in the room is "medically" incorrect.

If you wear glasses that flip the world upside down, in time your brain will flip it right way up....Weird...

However,handheld operating of saving private ryan is used very creatively and allows us to focus on the chaos not the handheld camera.

If we were to say, then how should a movie look like in POV. I think the best example is Strange Days. Of course then we might get into the argument that even though the motion is anatomicaly correct but there is no peripheral vision......that's a whole new ball game.
 
surely the fact that every major Film company in the world is jumping on to the bandwagon must count for something?
 
I really don't care much for handheld on the big screen. The smallest movement is amplified and thus the nausea inducing bourne effect.
 
I find the use of hand held way overkill and way unmotivated visually.

Think of using a locked down shot and suddenly you have to consider compostion and framing, staging and blocking; an area where many haven't a clue about.

It has it's place of course (babel, Children of Men, etc) but for the most part seems to be a lazy way to shoot.
 
Children of Men should be an example of how to employ a handheld camera "style" properly. You have to really think about how complicated the same elements John lists above were in principal for these guys.

It's not like Cloverfield.
 
Kholi said:
Children of Men should be an example of how to employ a handheld camera "style" properly. You have to really think about how complicated the same elements John lists above were in principal for these guys.

It's not like Cloverfield.
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:beer: :thumbup: :beer:
 
there's a great scene in Secrets & Lies when Brenda Blethyn and her daughter are in the restaurant. The scene plays out in a static 2-shot that lasts 10 minutes! Ya don't see much of that these days. I'm all for keeping it mixed up. Spike Lee will often go from some crazy cut-cut-cut-cut editing to a tracking shot that lasts for minutes. If you never cut, by the end of the movie that lack of manipulation can lose its effectiveness, just as if you're always cutting, that crazy pace can lose its effectiveness.

i know this isn't true, but whenever i see a movie that is entirely hand-held, i feel like they took the easy way out. it feels like cheating.
 
From a purist standpoint it can easily feel like cheating. The reality of it is that Handheld, employed by a crew that knows what to do, is very economical in many ways. Especially for those of us trying to shoot 35k ~ 50k Independent Features. Time = Money.

In the time it takes to setup a hi-hat, sandbags on that, then put half apples under that, no wait hollywood a full then add a sandbag.. no wait.... hurry we're losing light!...

I've already sat on my ass with a sandbag on my lap and contorted my body to fit it, gotten the shot, and moved on to the next frame.

I disagree that it's allowed to be sloppy, however, and again call Children of Men to the forefront as a modern example of how Handheld camera operating can take as much pre-planning as any static camera work and be just as effective.
 
TheMacB said:
If you never cut, by the end of the movie that lack of manipulation can lose its effectiveness, just as if you're always cutting, that crazy pace can lose its effectiveness.
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Right. Like almost any art form, interest is largely sustained through contrast - light/dark, motion/stillness, loud/soft, happy/sad, tension/release, etc. Whenever you stay too long in any of the poles, its impact is dulled, sometimes to near-nullification.

The last half (or more) of "Transformers" was like this for me - non-stop action that reached a saturation point long, long before it ended. I felt so numbed then that I simply didn't care what happened next (which was, of course, more mind-numbing action). By that point, if it had cut to a shot of a kitten sipping milk I probably would have stood up and cheered...
 
Children of Men was very intricately choreographed. Everything enters and exits frame just right. But it could have still been shot on Steadicam. There are plenty of examples of dynamic long takes on Steadicam. Take Snake Eyes for instance. There's a lot going on in that long first take. But nice and smooth, not shakycam.

Regarding every major film company jumping on the bandwagon. Well there ya go. There were periods in cinema history where zooms and slomo were overused too.
 
Kholi said:
From a purist standpoint it can easily feel like cheating. The reality of it is that Handheld, employed by a crew that knows what to do, is very economical in many ways. Especially for those of us trying to shoot 35k ~ 50k Independent Features. Time = Money.

In the time it takes to setup a hi-hat, sandbags on that, then put half apples under that, no wait hollywood a full then add a sandbag.. no wait.... hurry we're losing light!...

I've already sat on my ass with a sandbag on my lap and contorted my body to fit it, gotten the shot, and moved on to the next frame.
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I agree with you completely, most of the time handheld will save you tons of money if used properly. Moving a 140LBS camera on stick or a 800LBS camera on a Fisher dolly will take time even if you have a large crew.

I try to tackle that by using a steadicam on over the shoulder shots that should be lockdowns or have a light handheld look. It actually saves enormous amounts of time by very quickly setting/rehearsing shots and not having to worry navigating the set.

Whenever I need a handheld look I just tell my op to use it like "camera on a stick" by grabbing the sled very firmly. Works pretty well.


My op calls himself "A dolly that bleeds."
 
I actually became motion sick during Cloverfield and almost threw up several times. I had to frequently close my eyes and just listen to what was happening. The Bourne Identity didn't bother me at all, but I remember the Bourne Supremacy causing a little bit of dizziness and because of that I never even saw the third one.
 
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