what happened to locked down shots?

Okay, I haven't read this whole thread, so forgive me if this has been mentioned. But I think the constant camera movement is intended to give the audience the sense of actually 'being there' -- as if they are a person in the room watching events unfold. I, too, believe it's used WAY too much, and can be annoying and distracting.

I wonder how much of this movement is simply added in post?
 
I love camera movement, but only when it's maturely integrated with locked off stuff.

take spielberg for example.
 
I second the notion of Children of Men's camera work taking just as much skill and time, or more, as locked off compositions
 
For general movies: The central issue is perception of reality. In a feature film the intent is to create a sense of realism, that this thing really happened. This is from the filmmaker's point of view; the audience need not be aware of the techniques used to achieve reality.

For supernatural thrillers, martial arts movies, horror movies, etc. -- reality is seldom the issue. The filmmakers are seeking effective storytelling and entertaining techniques.

The trends for using hand-held, steady-cam, dolly, crane, tracking -- these have changed over time, but the biggest factors have been television, the zoom lens, the camcorder, amateur videography, commercials, reality shows -- the perception of what's real has changed, especially in recent years. Now, we see a lot of unsteady shots in major movies even.

All the points that have been made in this thread are valid. I just wanted to add the bit about the perception of reality in storytelling and the change in perception over time.

Ultimately for us filmmakers, it's important to be aware of the changes and the new trends. This has been a great thread. I enjoyed all the comments. Thanks...
 
agreed - The artists amongst us respond "I don't like that it make me feel ill - it is BAD", or "Ilove it, it's great".

The journeyman practitioners take note of its popularity - and try to understand the new rules and conventions it relies upon. Personal taste is secondary.

Fair assessment?
 
filmman said:
-- the perception of what's real has changed, especially in recent years. Now, we see a lot of unsteady shots in major movies even.
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Oh yes. My mother watches a soap opera in the morning. They obviously use handheld cameras. This allows for them to do more but sometimes I want to scream "How about siting it on a tripod when you're doing what amounts to a static shot. No you're hand is NOT steady!" Or "Was that overhead shot really needed?"

-Nate
 
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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It's the future! Just Kidding, but in a way, it is. Cinematographers that have 20 years deep in the industry are moving the camera a lot. With the majority of our audiences, it seems that moving the camera and having fast cuts, is what everyone is getting use too. So, to shoot every shot as if it was lock down could hurt the production value...again, this is only my opinion.

There is no harm to lock down every shot. Hopefully you have a kick a$$ story with phenomenal characters.

Try it out and see how it works. I can guarantee that the studios probably wouldn't like the idea of it. Give it a shot!

Cheers,

Murray
 
I think that's a lot of it Murray. Bottom line is that moving cameras add a lot of complexity/expense to a shoot so "lock down shots" = simple and cheap.
 
There Will Be Blood / No Country For Old Men / most Wes Anderson

these films had a nice combination of locked off, well composed shots and steadicam / roaming camera work

I agree that in general a lot of people use the "shakey cam" gimmick way too much... but I dont have a universal loathing for all things shakey cam.... it really depends on so many other factors...

for instance....

Babel / COM, it was used tastefully and it merged well with the story

24, uhhh, Bourne movies, etc... just makes me laugh (and get nauseated)

The Return by Andrei Zvyagintsev is a somewhat recent (2004-ish) example of a director who isn't scared to lock off and compose a beautiful image...

don't be looking / waiting for Hollywood to do this.... in their eyes, its buried, along with Ford
 
Come on, camera movement is older than colour in films.

Max Ophuls and Jean Renior in the 30's are great exmples of master directors who NEVER stood the camera still. Then, of course, there was Hitchcock, with it's intrincate camera moves and staging. Even the great Orson Welles is a good example.

Hand held camera is also something already "old". It is said that French New wave's directors (especialy Francoise Truffaut in "Jules et Jim") "freed" the camera from it's locking position (well, the new lightweight cameras helped a lot), and it was a revolution at the time.
In fact, The 70's (the best decade of American Filmmaking, next to the 40's, if you ask me) is filled with documentary style films. Can anybody say that William Friedkin's "The French Connection" (CLEARLY an influence of Bourne's movies) or Scorsese's "Mean Street" are examples of bad cinematography?...and none of the handheld movements on either of those movies come even close to the complexity of any handheld shot of Childen of Men.

Scorsese's said that he moves the camera a lot because, for him, that conveys a sense of observation, opposed to the almost spiritual contemplation of the motionless camera....and here's my point: he has a reason to move or not move the camera.

A movie shot only with static camera can be very, very boring and pointless too (believe me, in my country is like a standard for the i-wanna-be-seen-as-an-artist-but-know-nothing-about-filmmaking directors) even if it's a beautiful shot, but when it has a reason, then everything changes (Abbas Kiarostami has fifteen minutes static shot of a log, and belive it or not, it makes sense). In the hands of a good director, camera movement responds to an aestetic need more than anything else (and certainly, short atention span of modern audiences has nothing to do with anything here....well maybe to fast cutting and bad scripts...hehehe).

(Sorry for my bad english by the way)
 
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hoofandmouf said:
(...)

24, uhhh, Bourne movies, etc... just makes me laugh (and get nauseated)

(...)
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Somehow I got used to the 24 style. I found it intriguing but a little overdone in the first season. It seemed to get less nauseating from the second season on. I really like the precision with which the operators are doing these fast and on first glance "documentary-like" moves. If you try to replicate that you'll see it's not as easy as just zooming and moving somehow - that can go horribly wrong.
Now I don't even really notice the 24-style anymore when watching the show, I'm kind of expecting it I guess.

What makes me laugh is tv stations trying to replicate the 24 look in their programmes, so you'll have constant 24-like zooming and panning in interviews and shows. It's not easy to make that style work as naturally as it does in 24 - for stuff like real-life interviews it can't work at all in my opinion, because you can't plan on exactly when that zoom/pan is going to happen, and you usually don't have the opportunity to edit multiple camera angles.

For tv handheld camera is a double advantage: First it delivers to the short attention span of the watcher, and then it is also faster. If I have one hour to shoot a 3 minute piece, I'm pretty sure I do better handheld than with locked down shots, because with handheld I am able to get more scenes and more angles. I am also more flexible so I can make more shots useable when working with amateur talents (because I can take that step or two back or sideways during the shot when the "actor" does something else than what they should)
 
I watched a doc on History Channel the other night on Einstein. They had the stupid "24" type moves on sit down interviews with eminent physicists and scientists (which were very nicely lit and composed) and it drove me nuts, I hated it, it was moving the camera for the sake of moving the camera, to try to make something look hip. Ughh.

I may be misunderstood here, I am not against camera movement, I am against unmotivated camera movement. It is no different than editing. Anything other than a cut or dissolve as a scene transition is bad if it is unmotivated. Even somewhat cheesy transitions like center wipes and clock wipes can work if they are motivated, I think that there were some great, really cheesy ones on "Young Frankenstein", but they worked well. Same with shooting. If there is a reason to move the camera, then I love it. But when you have characters who are standing or sitting still and they are shot in what should have been a still composition or a smooth, seamless dolly , jib or Steadicam move and the camera is twitching and waving around, that drives me crazy because it looks so stupid.

I guess the bottom line is that there are a lot of filmmakers and television directors who don't seem to have any knowledge of the basics of filmmaking, they just think it looks cool to blindly move the camera all over the place all of the time. It is a matter of taste or lack of it as far as how and when to move the camera. All of the greats know how to move the camera, look at any Hollywood stage musical like "Goldiggers of 1932" or something like that. The cameras they were using back then weighed hundreds of pounds and it wasn't even remotely easy to physically move the camera but they did it and it generally worked pretty well.

But I still respect a director more if they can do both, create a great still composition and let the action play out within the frame AND if they know how and when to move the camera. I guess the good directors "move" the camera and the lousy directors "wave" the camera? ;-)

Dan
 
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Ted Spencer said:
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...
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Hahaha, this almost made me choke and spray my coffee all over my computer laughing at this... Funny!

I agree with the posters here that camera movement has its time and place whenever and wherever necessary to support and maximize the story.

When it's overdone, it can be excruciating to watch. For me, it's almost unbearable to watch any episode of 'The Office' because of the incessant camera movement and even worse, again at least for me, the constant zooming...
 
No, the office does it wonderfully, and it IS motivated, because it's documentary style. Very off the cuff, inprovised camera movements, as if they're capturing the action for the first time.

The office also has locked off interview shots.
 
david fincher does ALOT of locked off shots. he talks about his fondness for locked shots in one of his dvd commentaries.

he does quite a bit of dolly shots too, but if it's not a dolly shot you can bet your arse it's always locked
 
puredrifting said:
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
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bravo. well put.
 
I didn't read the whole thread but did anyone mention Ozu yet?! Man never moved the damn camera (ok, ok, early on he did, and Late Spring is the favorite of mine out of the very few I've seen, but eventually he just stopped)!

I actually just shot a short film where I did not move the camera once in any way. It was all locked down tripod shots and they're all LS. The opening shot is a long take too, around 6 minutes, and you really get a sense of time and space as characters move around this way and that. Something accidentally falls off a table, they just keep going. Etc.

I don't know, I like a good, unmoving square. I like precise framing. I like limited space. I like long, lingering shots. F the audience and their short attention spans. Let them walk out.
 
jpastuch said:
I didn't read the whole thread but did anyone mention Ozu yet?! Man never moved the damn camera (ok, ok, early on he did, and Late Spring is the favorite of mine out of the very few I've seen, but eventually he just stopped)!

I actually just shot a short film where I did not move the camera once in any way. It was all locked down tripod shots and they're all LS. The opening shot is a long take too, around 6 minutes, and you really get a sense of time and space as characters move around this way and that. Something accidentally falls off a table, they just keep going. Etc.

I don't know, I like a good, unmoving square. I like precise framing. I like limited space. I like long, lingering shots. F the audience and their short attention spans. Let them walk out.
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once again, bravo. now if we could just F the studios we could have film-making like it was in the 60's and 70's. i vote for a revolution!!!!! who's with me?
 
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