Concentration during the take & playback

Gohanto

Gohanto

Veteran
For you guys who've directed a bunch (especially anyone who goes for the more visual Spielberg/Scorsese/ect... styles), how do you handle watching everything at once during the take?

I've found that I've made mistakes both ways. Sometimes there's an fancy camera move I'm paying attention to (timing especially) and the acting falls short. Other times I'm 100% on actors and the timing of a slow push-in isn't just right.

The only way I've found to deal with this is by using playback on a rather consistent basis but that certainly slows a day down. Any opinions/tips?

Thanks!
 
Hence why the big films take a while. =D
It may take longer, but if that's the best way for you to get the quality you want-I'd say keep with it.
 
If you are lucky to work with operators you can trust wholeheartedly, and you also have good communication with them, then you can focus mostly on performance while rolling.
 
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You can't watch everything at once unless you're a spider. So you hire people whose answers you can trust when you ask "how was the camera move" or "how was that take". For me, in addition to that I would do playbacks on a decent-sized on-set HD monitor whenever possible, which is hopefully most of the time. A few minutes of it makes a huge difference in results, and deciding to do another take is a relatively small matter when setup and rehearsal might have taken many hours. Not to mention all the months and sometimes years of writing, casting, rehearsing, pre-prod, etc. Right there, right then, on set, is where you make all of that pay off forever...or not.

My primary background is in music recording, where playbacks are the absolute rule. A wealth of information comes from them, even when you've already heard them *in precisely the same manner* while they were performed (on studio monitors). It is amazing how much one's impressions can vary just from subsequent playbacks *of the identical thing*.

I think one of the commonest failings of low budget filmmakers is skipping playbacks for the sake of efficiency. I also believe that actors can greatly benefit from seeing what they're doing, particularly if you as the director are struggling to express a performance issue to them in ways they can relate to. A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say.

Evidently Stanley Kubrick was very fond of playbacks for actors when it seemed appropriate. Like I said above, his position was basically: "we've spent countless hours/months/years to get to this point. Why save a relatively minuscule amount of time by 'settling and moving on' when a knockout performance is probably just a take or two away?".

I'm all for that...
 
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Just to back up what everyone else is saying:

1. Prepare well in advance. Know the scenes/shots that require this level of perfection. Also make sure the fancy camera moves are the best way of getting across the emotion of the scene and are not just you trying to look like a great Director. A lot of fancy moves are just for vanity really. The mark of the greats in any field, whether it's art or sport or whatever, is that they make things seem simple.

Fancy moves also quickly lose their relevance if overdone.

2. Always have people you can trust on set. Especially a First AD. The first AD can work out the scenes that will take longer and give you the slack you need. If you are pressed for time (and which independent filmmakers aren't) don't waste time on "simple" shots and schedule for replays.

3. Communicate exactly what you are trying to achieve and the effect you want to all concerned. You can instruct a colleague to watch specifically for something.

You can also time pushes and things like that. You can do it artificially with animatics (eg Frameforge) or you can do it live on set. The actor delivers the lines, you time how long it takes and you can work out how slow the push needs to be. When you have specific things you want to achieve, you tend to need specific plans.

This is technically terrible advice, however; You can also "cheat" to some extent with the new super-resloution camera's. Take the Red shooting at 4K. You've got 2K redundancy built in to all intents and purposes (depending on what you're going to do with it). You can conceivably shoot a static shot and push in digitally in post, creating a perfectly smooth and perfectly timed shot.


You also have to make a choice at some point as to what you want to concentrate on. Either long term, or just for one particular film. Character piece=acting more important than camera moves (IMHO), action film camera moves of higher importance (perhaps, depends on the type of film). Two things that kill a film instantly: Bad sound and bad acting in that order. Visuals are far less important because we don't computate visual info at anything like the same speed as audio (24 static frames per second looks like moving images to us, we can comprehend thousands of Hz of audio in that time).

The audience to a large extent won't even notice fancy cmaera moves, because if they work they are invisible. I remember my friedn coming out of the Insider and raving about the camera work during the court scene (there were huge crane shots floating around). He's just a lay person, not a filmmaker, but for me it showed that the Director had lost control of the emotion fo the scene. It was supposed to be the emotional centre of the piece but people were notcing the camera movement and not paying attention to the actors. Any move should accentuate and support the acting, not override it.
 
Now you know why the role of a playback operator is so demanded on anything with a decent budget and decent crew and director on... It's impossible to keep an eye on everything.
 
Strangely enough I've found I can focus more on the performance when I'm operating the camera myself. Something about the intense focus needed to do that sharpens my eye. When you as the cameraman get in sync with the actor it's like a sensual dance.
 
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