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Lesson Info

Camera Movement

Let's talk about moving camera and all the different types of moves, which we're gonna demonstrators, many of them as we can after I go through the ball and we'll have some fun with it. So, um, we're gonna talk about the pan shot. Not a pan shot is a side to side shot. It's short for panoramic, right? So it's It's following a moving character or going across the landscape. It's You can fit more into your frame and give more information to your to your audience when you move the camera across, because in a fixed situation, background isn't moving. But you can actually add a whole lot more. With that sweeping left to right, moving right to left move, you can create a sense of place in in filmmaking. It's a really good way to kind of start with an establishing shot to open up with that, we're going talk more about those kinds of shots later as well. Um, the next one on the list is a tilt now. The opposite off the pan is the tilt, which is up and down. So it's off that one axis same way. S...

o instead of going this way, we're going this way. Is that up and down without changing the camera position? Um, so if a slow upward tilt kind of gives us the idea that something is more significant in the frame or slow downward tilt makes something look less powerful, less significant Things have a tendency to have a different aspect when they're shot from pan or tilt. So, like a look down, things will be a little bit smaller and thinner, and a look up will make things look a little bulkier and thicker. So those things are kind of elements that you might want to use and storytelling, because it's important that you want to make a character look ominous or more important or less important, these of these are some of those tools that you can use. Um, it helps us create a more deep, three dimensional world to in that when you can kind of move both the pan and the tilt, your creating a space that more or less the way your eyes can move where we don't just stare straight ahead, and we don't just move our heads to move our eyes, we actually can move like in a more gyroscopic. What? So a zoom? This is something as photographers were really familiar with, right? It's that punch in. But the rest of the world isn't moving. Just our focal length is moving, so we're just changing our optics right. It's like slapping on a lens that gets you closer to the action. Except now we have resume. But I mean the it shows size and perspective, and it brings things closer to the lens. But we're going to talk about what's next. The the zoom like the snap zoom and the stuff that you see that that goes in either even sometimes when it's slowly done is sort of out of. It's not really a new element that gets used a whole lot. It should be used really sparingly in filmmaking and has to have a real purpose. Um, but it's some, and it should be almost unnoticeable when you do it comparatively. The next one, the dolly shot is when the camera is gliding toward or away from the subject. Now, when you do this on a dolly, which we showed earlier, the whole world moves not just the subject, not just the focal length. So when you're moving in and moving out. It has a sense that it could be create a little bit of the illusion of walking toward or backing away from a subject. It also creates a sense of intimacy. It makes you sense of more importance in the shot. So if I'm I'm gradually pushing in, I can. I'm getting a sense that this person or this what this person is going to say, what this person going to do is significantly more important than what just happened before it, um, so that, essentially, is the use in the of the dolly shot. Now, of course, there's also the opportunity. In certain in certain cases is to do combination shots what we could talk about that in a little bit. We talk a little bit about that. Pushing that pole and the whole concept of push and pull in filmmaking is really about the variance of shots and creating different emotions with with the camera moves, Um, can I direct your attention to things that you want people to look at or create the illusion that something is more important or less important based on what we're what's happening? It also gives you a sense of movement in the space where, like, let's say, in a horror movie, we're getting closer, We're getting closer, we're getting closer, we're getting closer and things are getting more tense. And it's about it's a way to kind of evoke an illicit emotion from your audience. Could also help combine Ah wide shot and a specific tight shot. So if I start wider and then I zoom and I come in and I get closer and I kind of frame a little bit differently, the Dalai can help, and the push and pull could help get you into that frame. Where you on Lee. You don't want to do a cut there. You want to continue to roll cameras, but you want to combine two shots. That's a good opportunity to do that. Um, so the slider and the follower the truck shot are basically based on the same kind of thing I want dropped back a little bit into this slide and show you what I mean is that the side to side movement off of this particular Dana Dolly is essentially like what we do with a slider is we were gliding across. We're trucking we could follow action, weaken. It's another way to smoothly move the camera from side to side without that jerking motion and kind of go almost unnoticed by the audience. So, um, and it's like you're moving. Ah, the across an entire fixed point, So you're kind of just gliding and sliding. I think it's pretty obvious for anybody who's worked with a slider to understand how the application fills. That builds up to something like that. And again, that track movement or some other type of if you put it on a car or anything like that, anything where your tracking side to side even that shot of Alex with the gimbal when he's like on a skateboard going next to these guys riding the Vespas. Same thing, same concept just scaled up or down. So the slider is Ah, is a good example. You know of how that could be used in different ways. Ah, the boom or the crane or the jib of the pedestal shot is this is where, not like a tilt where the cameras fixed at one point and going like this. This is where it's kind of traveling like an elevator, so it's going up and it's going down the entirety of the camera and the mechanism is following either up or down. So it's in relation to the subject that you're shooting. Ah, the entire camera is moving right again. Not just the lens or not just the pivot, but the entirety of the camera is moving. It's a way to talk, to frame a tall subject to while standing at eye level, so like you can, you can basically get the camera up at eye level with the tall subject. It could also again used as a combination to combine two shots. So yesterday I was watching a show, and it started with a wide master and then kind of slowly lowered it. The camera came in lower and then came in tight and then settled here in the middle of the frame with our main subject in the center. So again, combining two shots, combining your establishing your master with a medium close up or something a little bit tighter. Here's something that you're familiar with. I think if you've done any kind of handheld video is a rack focus. Now, rack focus is technically not a camera move. You're not actually moving camera, but you're creating the illusion off movement with focus. So if I have to a move, try to demonstrate this in a little bit later. If we have two subjects ah, stacked in frame and we we change focus from one to the other and back and forth it's a way to follow dialogue. It's a way to follow reaction shots. It's a way to follow the action and give emphasis when needed. Um, it's also a way to sort of bring an introduced into a scene, a no idea or a frame. So it's, um it's also about constructing two shots and won. A lot of these things are used to kind of as editing techniques within the camera, so you can actually create a little bit more movement, an interesting kind of dynamic dynamo. Dynamic, dynamic, dynamic dining, Buddhism I dont know. Can you somebody tell me how to say that word? Uh, I talked a little bit about steady and easy camp again, this is a way to move the camera in ways that, um, to track through difficult terrain up downstairs through mazes thes Those are great examples, because clearly, before we had a Steadicam that would have been a very difficult shot to make with a cameraman running up a set of stairs or running through a maze or following. One of the great examples of some really good study work recently was Season one of True Detective with that one one take scene where the camera just follows people through for, I guess, what is that? That's probably like a five minute scene, maybe longer. One take everything going through that's all steady. So that's and I think it's all study, anyway. Looked like study. Um, then, of course, we have handheld shots, which is probably the thing that you're gonna be most using most often right up front is holding a camera and moving it the way your body moves. And Handheld has a lot of different applications in across all different formats. Obviously, it gets used a lot in documentary filmmaking. It gets a lot get used a lot in in narrative filmmaking that has, you know, device capabilities, meaning I want to use hand held to show uneasiness. I want the camera to be moving back and forth. So Alex was telling me, Well, that's Powell. Um we go back to where we were, but Alex was telling me about a time when he was on set and he was shooting something in. The director wanted the action to feel unsteady and uncomfortable, and he was moving the camera like, you know, according to what the director wanted. And then the director just came over to him while they were rolling cameras and just started shaking his body to make the camera go like this. And it turned out to be great. It was, and it worked with. The reality is that using it toe indicate unsteadiness are unease. And when you see good handheld, it feels like it's alive. It feels like you're watching through your own eyes and what when it's intentionally trying to make you feel uncomfortable. A lot of times you'll see that extra movement, or even something like the camera is cantered right where you see somebody walking down the hallway and it looks like they're walking sideways. That's meant to make you feel uncomfortable. That doesn't necessarily mean it's handheld. It could be any of these devices, but it is something off a mechanism and then the combo shot that I want to talk about that's most often used is sort of where the camera is sliding in one direction and it's on a fluid head and then has the opportunity to pivot while it's moving sideways in the other direction. So that's called a parallax, and that's something that you'll see a lot. And I've just recognized it in a couple of commercials I watched the other day where we have a camera on a slider. It's going sideways and all of a sudden starts to pivot back toward the subject, but we're still moving away from it. So that is, um, that is definitely, ah, a shot that will be harder to execute. Your camera up will need to know how to make that shot or you need to practice that shot. But it is something that again gives you the opportunity to combine shots with different ones. Now, this isn't a comprehensive list of all of the kind of shots you're going to use, but it is definitely ah, good starter list of being aware off the kinds of shots that are available to you. And while you're moving the camera and why the motivation to do so Excellent. OK, so I think right now what we want to do is we want to try to demonstrate as many of these as we can. So we're gonna have our cameraman come out and he's gonna help us and show I'm gonna play director a little bit, and we're gonna basically set up a couple of different things. We're gonna set up a couple of ways in which we're gonna move the camera that we have the capability to do today. And then I'm gonna set up a little bit of a scene to show a basic that basic blocking map that we talked about earlier, where we had the calf. This is basically a bakery scene where two characters is sitting at a table talking to one another. We're gonna try to set something up like that and then also in that, in that set up, maybe demonstrate a few other moves. So Hello. How are you? Introduce yourself. I'm covert guys, so thank you, Colburn, from being out here. So here's our Here's our cameras set up for right now. This is what I was talking about earlier. We have a set of sticks on a fluid head pan until fluid head on castors. So this allows us to both move the camera side to side. We can move the camera if I released the trigger here, up and down. And then we can also move the camera in and out, which is a good cheat when you don't have a dolly or a slider. So this is sort of the five and one kind of, ah, Swiss Army knife off. You know, starter kits for for filming. So, um, so what we're gonna do right away is we're gonna use Drew is our subject. We're gonna demonstrate a pan, we all we're gonna shoot him here first or wait. Can you keep him? We can probably keep you over there until we bring you over here. I can remember. Yeah, we could do that. So basically, we're gonna pan across. I'm going to show how the camera moves smoothly from side to side and bring We're gonna bring Let's let's bring him from Let's bring Let's find something to focus on. Let's I don't know what else. So let's focus on me. How about that? So here I am, and then we're gonna pan over. We're gonna pan over to Drew. So we start here and then I'm gonna walk out of your frame and they were gonna pan over to Drew. So that is a good. As an example of how the camera moves, we did a little bit of a complex thing where we started on one object. I walk out of the frame and he kind of and we bring him in. So basically, we're opening our scene with with our host in his chair, and he's gonna the next thing he's going to do is tell us something and unimaginably beautiful. Wonderful. Okay, so that's a pan Pan going side to side. So the next thing we want to do is tilt. So this is this piece of equipment would also do that really easily. So let's do a combo shot where we start in on his computer Apple thing. OK, and then we're gonna tilt up to his face and then come into focus. So his emeritus there's the move. So there's a tilt move and we could use that move in a lot of different applications. But let's say right now we're telling the story of this writer who's struggling with writer's block and we start and we start the scene there on his hands and in his computer. And then we go up to his face filled with anguish. He can't figure out why it is that he can't figure out what to write today. So there's our tilt move, but also a little bit of combo. Colburn's definitely more skilled at this little combo move. We're going all he did a little pan and tilt at the same time. We didn't do a straight up and down tilt. I think that we get that we get the sense of what that's about. Um, then the zoom. So Zoom is clearly where we're going to get on our subject and by using an optical zoom. So we have a full set here. We don't really know what this is about. Everybody sort of casual. What kind of watching? And then all of a sudden, the camera starts to zoom in on one person, and it's a soft zoom. We're getting a clear indication that he's the most important person in our frame, and then we get it in tight as we can, and I mean I mean so handsome and look at this. I mean, it's unbelievable that the acting is stellar. Amazing. So there's our There's our zoom feature, and that could be used to a certain effect. But what we just did there is a clear indication as to why we would use a zoom is to we start with a wider shot, and then we focus in on something that's more important. Okay, so now we're gonna cheat a little bit because we got this set of sticks on wheels. So we're gonna do a little bit of a slider shot. So we're gonna actually move the camera side to side while keeping. We're gonna move right into we're gonna move. Yes. We're gonna go across. You have enough room there. You don't have enough room yet. OK, so we're going to do basically a slider shot or truck shot where we're gonna go down the line and we're cheating a little bit, but that the whole world is moving with us and we're moving across to see our audience, and then we will settle in on our host, and there he is so moving side to side, we have the slider action and or the trucking shot. We were going across across our subject. We could also cheat a little bit with this and do a dolly shot where If we start right where, let's say weaken whoever you want to focus on. And then we will push in on a dolly, which is we have our little hack going here. And here is our Dolly shot. We're pushing in. We're pushing in. We're pushing in again. The whole world is moving, not just the lens. So it's very similar in that we are trying to emphasize one particular thing. We're bringing our audience closer to our subject and then again in reverse, we're bringing the dolly shot out for that pull away to reveal more of the world to see more of the environment he's in. So maybe we're staying. We're talking about this particular person. We don't really know where he is, but then we pull back and we realized, Wow, he's in a class about filming this amazing. And look, there's a camera in the background is all kind of stuff happening? So we revealing more of the world when we do that. Okay, so now this one might be a little bit harder to do, but I'm gonna walk across the room and you're gonna follow me if you can, and we'll talk about a little bit of a follow shot. So actually, you could do that. We don't need to do it on the way we could do just the sense off moving in space. So from if I'm traveling through space and I'm walking and my cameras following me and it's it's experiencing all the things in the world around me, I'm gonna turn and he's still on the same side of the plane I'm walking through. And again, that's a follow shot. So he's following me through space. Okay, We're getting a lot done here. This is great. Okay, so we're also here now we're handheld, right? So even no matter what kind of a shot we want to make here, I'm crossing the line. Um, he's handheld and he's mobile, so he can actually move the camera in many different ways. At this point in a panning motion in a tilting motion, he can actually even create somewhat of a pedestal shot by coming down with me, moving the entire camera with with me up and down So by doing that, I'm doing my squats today because I didn't work out, Um, again, that camera movement that up and down pedestal movement is important in that you can create different types of shots, and that's where you get on the crane or you know, you on the jib and move the camera up and down in space. What else is on our list? Well, you don't have a steadicam toe work with today, so we're not gonna do that. Here's what I would like you to do. I'm going to stand here. I want you to focus on my face. And here's that shot of the instructor talking to the class. And then, of course, he pans over my right shoulder and Rack focuses on to the host who's so bored with this presentation that he doesn't know what he wants to do anymore. He's just And then you come back to me and I'm completely unaware of the fact that he is just really bored out of his mind and doesn't want to be here anymore. But you know, so where show we're telling a little bit of a story and that the host is completely unaware that the people behind him are just bored out of their minds. So that's a rack focus. So we're changing the story. We're telling the story with essentially a focal camera moves. So where, Where? Combinator? We're combining two ideas to depths off field into one shot.