Great Camera Work - Ice Dancing

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
 
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.
 
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
 
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...
 
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.
 
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.
 
I recently had a job where the client wanted gimbal work of dancers. It's not easy you need to know the choreography stay close while not getting in the way. The camera operator for this did a fantastic job. That's quiet a rig he has. I saw a recent youtube review of the R5. The reviewer showed a job where his gf was on ice skates filming a professional ice skater routine with R5 on a DJI RS2. Lighter and smaller setup of course with that type of gimbal your hands have to hold it.
 
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puredrifting said:
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.
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I wouldn't say that my opinions are "what's popular," especially judging by my recent dust-ups on dvxuser. I feel like I'm often in the minority

The dance shooter I work with basically alternates 50/50. about half the time, she's shooting in the base position to avoid keystoning on the body, and shes capturing the entire dance figure/movement, even if there's expressive camera work and lighting. Maybe more than half the time.

The rest of the time, she will crop, foreshorten etc and use photo effects to make something less technically dance-oriented and more pure photography-oriented

I dont need this clip to be a oner per se. It could be 5 or 10 shots. I just like the long takes where the camera moves with the couple so I can really follow along with the dancing. I dont really care about close-ups. To me, the answer to having close-ups for something like this is ideally watching it in higher resolution on a larger screen so you can see facial detail and limb detail in the wide.

But sure, if there's acting between the two of them and theres a prominent facial component, they could cut in.

This feels more special to me as a very strong choreographic presentation than the many, many multi-camera edits that tell the story of the ice dance. If ice dancing were always shot as a oner, I'd probably be just as excited about something with lots of angles and cuts
 
First of all, wow! The performance was a tour de force. The skaters weren't bad either.

puredrifting said:
this had to have been 100% tightly rehearsed
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Sounds right. The camera changes direction on a dime, with the skaters.

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.
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I agree, even though I'm a bit odd in that I have come around to the belief that most scenes should have as few cuts as possible. Sometimes that would be a oner, but other times just some carefully chosen cuts.

However in this case, I agree, it feels claustrophobic. Also, dance has geometric aspects. So it would be nice to cut to a wide, preferably static, shot for relief. With ice skating in particular, a nice drone shot from above, straight down, static on the whole rink as the skaters move around in circles, spirals, etc., would be cool.

But not too many cuts. I'm sure it's my film background, every cut pulls me for a split-second out of the story, like a little electric shock (I must have PTSD). "Oh, they cut there. . . . Oh, that's a nice angle . . . (Or) that's not such a nice angle. . . . Why are you chopping up the scene so much!"
 
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I found it irritating. In order of irritation:

- With that lens, one second they fill the screen and then rapidly shrink to half the size of the frame and then suddenly fill the frame again. It was like watching How The West Was Won in Cinerama. Really dopey (not dope) looking and had notions of being nauseating.
- As a spectator, I want to stand at the side of the rink and watch. Gliding along with them was somehow off-putting.
- Quite disturbing to have the camera change heights in a couple of places. No motivation and it made things seem odd.
- Having the skates as loud the music was off-putting. With music, drop the skates way to the background. No music at all would have been interesting.

If it were done some other way, I might really like it. Watching a bit of it was nice; when they stayed relatively the same in the frame.

As a TD for over 20 years I somewhat agree, mostly because of the way it was shot. It was too much of a good/bad thing. As a viewer, it was probably pretty cool for a one time thing. I wouldn't want to watch the Olympic figure skating this way. A different way something like this? Yes, it could be very good. This was off. It needs work. With high resolution and big screens, I've been an advocate of just locking down the camera and let the audience watch. Like for a football game.
 
Paul F said:
- Having the skates as loud the music was off-putting. With music, drop the skates way to the background. No music at all would have been interesting.
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It's funny, I watched this silently (as I watch most things that I'm evaluating online for visuals). I don't think the soundtrack has any bearing on the performance of the operator, although it can certainly influence our perceptions of the piece as a whole
 
Re: cutting in for close-ups (which maybe wasn't what puredrifting was talking about, but bear with me) - I've heard guitarists say that they hate seeing shots of a single hand playing guitar because it's not that meaningful to observe what one hand is doing without seeing the other. So basically they never want to see a hands shot that is tighter than both hands.

I sort of feel the same way about a close-up on skates or faces. It can add a cinematic flair, so maybe it's worth it. But it detracts from an observation of the dance-craft, so you have to weigh your priorities

And here I think that the viewing conditions are very influential for shot and editing choices. As in - if the video will be played back in very low resolution, I'd be more inclined to compromise and add a c/u of interesting details so at least the viewer can get a good look at the face or whatever at some point. But the higher the effective viewing resolution, the more I would be inclined to stay with a wide shot
 
ahalpert said:
Re: cutting in for close-ups (which maybe wasn't what puredrifting was talking about, but bear with me) - I've heard guitarists say that they hate seeing shots of a single hand playing guitar because it's not that meaningful to observe what one hand is doing without seeing the other. So basically they never want to see a hands shot that is tighter than both hands.

I sort of feel the same way about a close-up on skates or faces. It can add a cinematic flair, so maybe it's worth it. But it detracts from an observation of the dance-craft, so you have to weigh your priorities

And here I think that the viewing conditions are very influential for shot and editing choices. As in - if the video will be played back in very low resolution, I'd be more inclined to compromise and add a c/u of interesting details so at least the viewer can get a good look at the face or whatever at some point. But the higher the effective viewing resolution, the more I would be inclined to stay with a wide shot
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This 100% ties in with the audience and who the video is intended for. I discovered that in dance films. If you are creating a film for dancers and dance judges, you would frame it and edit in a very different way than
you would for a general audience because the two audiences want to see and experience it in a different way and have different priorities. General audiences have zero attention span these days while dancers or in this
case, skaters, would have a very high concentration threshhold and for them, seeing it presented like this would be perfect, a oner.
 
I am in the general audience group and thought it was great. Held my attention from beginning to end. I felt like I was in rather than outside the moment.
 
I watched it last night and was very impressed with it on a technical and precision level and saw a few “shots” that I thought were very cool. As a stand alone, “hey, let’s looks at this” and analyze what they’re doing, it’s fine, but strictly for entertainment, no. I re-watched it today to show one of my friends while we had some down time on our shoot and I was extremely bored with it. If you were cutting a few of the cool shots with other shots from more traditional type coverage, they could add a lot, but once you see that one time, you never need to see it in its entirety again.

I’m not taking anything away from the skaters or cameraman. I don’t watch that type of stuff, but I was mesmerized by the skaters. That was a flawless execution of skill, talent, coordination and precision of all involved, but 85%-90% of that shot was boring.
 
You guys are over thinking this. The guy filming is an ex figure skater not someone with a cinema background. I don't know his life story or what he's trying to achieve. His skill is following skaters on ice providing a unique gimbal angle. I could see skaters hiring him to film their routine for various reasons. For promotions they'd probably pull a clip here or there. A multi cam shoot would provide the variety of shots you normally see on tv of a performance and this method wouldn't work because he'd be in the other camera's shots. It could only be done if they repeated their performance but that's a far more complex and expensive setup that would exceed the budget.
 
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