Lessons

Lesson Info

Motivated vs Unmotivated Movement

Motivated verse unmotivated movement this is a biggie. You gotta give reason for your movement or when you don't have a reason for not having having the reason for your movement, right? So here's uh, actually let's, just watch it catch what motivated frame? Anyone person? So I want to get the camera down to our guy at the bottom, right? So I'm going to send something down with him to follow. Here goes a cigarette so we follow the cigarette down the cigarette motivated our movement down. It wasn't just a random pan. We follow that cigarette as a cigarette goes, so it is still a motivated movement, so it doesn't feel random and out of nowhere, even though you're not fully picking up on it, it feels right, at least to me and that's a very, very simple one unmotivated movements, the camera's moving on its own definitely calls attention to itself, and I definitely use these all the time. This is from the opening scene of tell they did move and start moving on our own wait motivated anymore,...

warning to some of these clips that we're about to play. I'm looking over there and I'm not getting a dirty looks, so I think we're okay. Okay, so let's go through this again and we're gonna talk about the movement, but we're going to talk about other choices I made as a director, which we're just gonna keep pointing these things out, even if it's not we're talking about again, we're going to the duality, we're splitting them right down the middle and if you listen, you'll hear dogs barking, that wasn't there we had three audio designer put that in there sort of dogs sense danger, right? So that was the idea behind that very, very subtle sort of thing when you hear a dog barking marking for no reason, what do you immediately think something's wrong up? Check that so we popped that in this kind of suddenly gets you thinking that way, then he leaves us, we don't want to see what's happening. I thought it was much more disturbing one to not show it to. I didn't want to show because I thought it was a little gratuitous and the story didn't need that, but it needed to be something intense enough, like a hammer to the head to then reverberate through the entire film that you had to remember what he did because that's going to drive everything so it couldn't be a simple kill and I didn't want to show something that graphic, so this was my way of doing it I walk you through the scene you kind of doing this the entire time anticipating building that suspense that hitchcockian idea of its not the explosion but everything before it that is the tension so leaving that motivated move and motivating the movement was a purple person purposeful decision to guide you through and get to kind of looking around every corner to focus in on the fact that you don't know where he is anymore we're just aimlessly floating through this world finding out what just happened uh let's actually messed with some screen direction right now motivated and unmotivated real quick let's do it come this way josh wanna grab the camera you want to help him wrangle that again we're gonna stay without lighting won't you come right here actually why don't you come right here? Why don't you come over here? You want to be an actress? I heard what you come up here on we're going let's go hand held start you're gonna come right here here's your mark uh how's it feeling shoulder should go back a touch right there you got to pull focus on the on the move so let's start here we'll just do something really, really simple and then you're going to start here and I think you were gonna walk this way then just gonna walk past josh and urine and right here I'm right here we're going to move from stark and then we're going to end on josh so when what she starts walking this way and j case looking here I want you to step back so we can move right here so we're going to follow her over once she walks back we're going to follow car over and don josh don't we punch out of touch to give you more of a chance and actually why don't we take the iris a bit let's yeah let's let's go up and then keep going well just should shifty eye isoda toe makeup for the difference yeah here yeah yeah they won over and take that to say two thousand and then shifty iris teo competent all right we're not worried about what this looks like we're just worried about what we're doing with it so let's go let's do one half speed so so we could just get the move ready and action courtney all right one more and let's land with him right frame cut back up three more steps courting all right one more and action courtney all right let's do the exact same thing courtney you can go ahead and sit down for this one so that would be a motivated move courtney's leading us over to josh uh it's an extra as a day player is somebody who doesn't matter to the scene it's just somebody walking through uh but without it whenever you're ready josh action feels entirely different it's insane how much of a difference that makes just somebody walking through motivating the camera giving sense to the reason why the camera's moving and that person doesn't even have anything to do with the scene it's just somebody walking straight through can you straighten that up a bit just to bring up spielberg as much as humanly possible and we could shift back to the keynote spielberg does this amazingly especially in some of his old film there's so much going on and in fact any sort of classic film has amazing blocking it just so much background action foreground action that has nothing to do with the scene but to motivate the camera to liven up the frame like we were doing it what was it yesterday everything feels like a blur to me now when we created that party scene we had people wiping the frame walking in the background is well you're creating energy but if we had movement that could motivate the frame as well because we could catch one of them and move to our next actor if we wanted to instead of just cutting on it screen direction leaving and arriving keeping visual coherency leaving and arriving for me leaving is right toe left frame arriving has left the right frame that's just how I see it more than likely it's just because that's what film language has told me but if I see something going from right to left it's leaving if it's a house and if a car's driving from left to right there going back home so I usually try to keep to that for the most part but also if you're doing something like this scene that I'm about to show you it's a huge huge help and keeping everything coherent so your audience knows exactly what's happened way and even if we go further back as that other hunter that shooting at our main character was running towards him he's always running right to left and our heroes always running left to right even when we cut to the other hunter like I said that's in a totally different scene or location he's also looking rightto left running right to left so we have our good guy and our evil forces coming together always the exact same way to trains coming to collide and that's sort of helping me build the tension what's happening along with the music this sort of ramping up ramping up, ramping up, ramping up until we get to that first hit which is hopefully getting you to a place where you're like oh man until that first hit happens again giving your audience that experience that ride your project so making locations work for you so moving on from that and I guess before we move on from that because this is a touch different are they any questions about that as faras the emotion of telling the story visually, yes, just not really question, but it occurs to me that what you were doing there is very similar to the one, eighty rule entirely, even though they're not in the scene together. Yep, it's pretty much the exact same principle that which is what we're talking about yesterday, all these ideas, even when talking about lighting, what lighting is doing, it translates to everything else. So if you really just understand one, you could start using that to understand the other is kind of like they say, if you can play the piano, you can almost play any instrument it's sort of the same idea. I really understand not just how to make something look nice, but why it looks nice and why it's getting you to feel that way think that way and you could start to have that translate to all other avenues of that even the sound that we were showing that the sound of the dog barking that sound design has nothing do with cinematography, but those two things are playing together, and as a director, I'm using both of those those are all instruments, and you're you know, orson to get the thing to do what you want, we have general questions throughout the morning to do a little q and a or okay. So earlier people had started asking when they were watching the shoot andrew fletcher had wanted to know do you have a technique for achieving a smooth pan? Fluid heads are wonderful, so that's going yeah that's going to come a lot with the tripod yet that you're using but if you are using a cheaper tripod which this is not my original idea sell somebody else do this online years ago and I think it's genius if you just take a rubber band and put it on the handle and use the rubber band to push the handle along that's actually going toe turn into a shock absorber for you way down your tripod because usually if they're cheap tripods came from like best buy or something you know rickety those things are weigh it down somehow put some weight on it so it's not flopping around so much then use a rubber band to pull the handle along and you're going to get much, much money to move out of it. Cha ki l wanted to know when you're shooting dialogues do you do on ly the lines of one person first without the other person talking or shoot them both doing their lines in each shot both in each shot? I mean sometimes when when we're doing film riot it's comedy it's really fast paced, we're really not trying to make nail some awesome performance s so often times josh just be in front of the camera looking at absolutely no one at acting to nothing and me feeding lines being like I say this and he's never even read the script so we'll do it that way but that's not how you make short film obviously when we do things like proximity tell and what not you're shooting from the one perspective I'm filming you right now and we have the character here and he's delivering all his lines and he's bouncing off him so they're both fully performing the scene as if they're in it as if they are those characters and you act out the entire scene as you would a stage play and you get it from each of your angles otherwise your actors acting from nothing and acting as they say is reacting which is kind of kind of comical to say aloud now because it's been turned into a joke but it's very very true you're reacting off of what the other performer is doing and if you're not getting that feedback of emotion it's kind of really hard t hit that obviously a lot of actors do it can do its part of their job but you want to help them get to that place every way you can not make it harder for them well let's just take one more from matt abraxas how are there two monitors on the rig s o we had today okay, you want to bring that on over? Let's, bring that on over, I think had three. How many monitors that we have when we do it? Data dobie in the frog was it? But it was one, two, three. Well, essentially was for no, you're right, okay? And we actually kind of have three here right now because you could take that off and that's a monitor. So this is the viewfinder that what you've been seeing j k over here, which we decided to call him using. Then we have the lcd of the cameras. This is attached the camera it's, not external monitor. This is the actual external monitor that I've been using as my director's monitor, so when you have a camera operator dp, whatever it is, they're using this guy or another monitor I'm over here using this monitor. Usually you would wanna have a wireless system going on where I'm away from the camera with a monitor holding it. You'll see directors doing that all the time on set this it can also be the monitor for the first day see pulling focus so you'll set it up like this and he'll be over here with focus pool, which will do a little bit later, pulling focus watching here this one's over here just for the camera operator to keep framing this guy we have open just so we can change settings quickly and like but really the only ones that we need is this guy and this guy right here I think we're good so making locations work for you you can change the location of your layout we talked a little bit, I think already about location finding locations it can be very difficult and finding the right location for what you wrote if you didn't write with a location in mind can be extremely difficult. That was my problem with tell I wrote something that the space was very specific we lived in this one house and had to move through very specifically and there was no one place that looked like that, so I use several places to be won and I've done this tons of times actually I think we have a clip so we're going to use multiple locations of one great so this is a good example this is not the most extreme they did we'll talk about that in a second, but we have our character moving down this long hallway, which I wanted to sort of create suspense of this like, you know, a dead man walking situation because he heard something in the attic he put you know, the girl that he killed in the attic at this point so, he's walking to go look, look into this so he's about to walk in the bedroom and this bedroom actually leads into a bathroom, not spectrum, but we cut into him walking into the bedroom. No one knows the difference. Then he walks into the closet he's going to go up into the attic, and that attic is an entirely different house. This attic did not work for us, so we actually drove to my brother's house and use his addict. So we're using three locations essentially to be one on another short film I did, which will never see the light of day that's one of the ones that I burnt, buried and prayed over so no one will ever find it don't want to come back as a zombie and ruin my career, uh, in that short film is still going on behind me. My god, this is a long clip in that short film, I have a character walk into one house start walking up the stairs because I needed to story sort of house. Then she walks into the bedroom of my sister's apartment. Then she walks into the bathroom, that's into the bedroom and the bathrooms at my girlfriend's house and that's, how the entire film played between seeing the scene and it's seamless. You can't really tell you to cancel out the door obviously into something that looks entirely different it totally works so you can take summer locations and if you shoot smart and plan ahead of time you could use those locations to fit your scene perfectly and this is my brother's attic and it totally works you have no idea that down below is actually a garage not a closet this is another good example we're in the exact same location but we're using the space of the location a little differently he looks up sees the girl across from him totes and love uh and this one actually worked by I'm looking at you and you're looking over here but it's actually over there because behind me was just a wall there very boring over there looks great so we're using those two spaces to be won and you can't really tell the difference so let's actually do that real quick hey j k you want to grab that again just up and down for you man can you just kick a kino on just so we have a little bit of light happening let's just do this guy because it has a balance and everything set up just set it up right here or bill you want to sit in this chair right there should be fine that's good that's good that's good we're gonna deal with it let's lock that down just move your chair forward bring it this way way on the side of bill that mug yep stop down to about here let's go like right here yeah yeah when she switched all that around no frame up okay right here for me wait focus right rolling right here you're looking at someone good let's do one more how uncomfortable are you just a little right here looking anthem make a little creepy little creep here you got weird things in mind man stuffs about to go down bareness alright great start why don't you come over here? Stand right here let's get the camera about yea high it's like stand right here for me gonna go right here let's go a little lower than that actually let's be about shoulder height with him with gonna frame him right let's fix that exposure just take it down just a notch said so let's go to like a five yeah fight should be song that's good where you were just just frame all right yeah that's fine. Start right here much less write in my hand right there. All right let's roll stark look away then look at my hand and in my hand what the hell wait you're kind of into it creepy smile was no that was a creepy smile you're the king of creepy smile all right, so let's bring that over and cut it together because why not and while I captured this do we have any questions on any of that so far even though I know we just jumped into that? Not yet I can't ask a different question sure so just watching the films and especially of the video that we watched yesterday someone had asked how do I shoot a fight scene without good fighters? That is a really good question the real answer is you're not going to get a good fight scene without people who don't you know, work good physically if you're just going to get in okay fight scene at best their tricks that you could do like the snap zoom and things like that but if they're not very good physically if they're very stiff there's not too much you could do there's a little workarounds, but at best you're just gonna get something that's okay it's not gonna work out one hundred men but we are going to be talking about fight scenes and things like that in the second bit won't take another question dakota dakota howard had asked after filming, should you cut your film together and then put effects on it or should you find the clips you want put effects in it and then cut it all together? I usually will edit everything together I'll take the bits that had that need the vfx export those out send it to my b effects artist so everything's cut without the v effects there and then I'll plug it back in finished if that makes sense but stark wants to answer and there's something called handles which is adding frames to the beginning and end so the editor has something to work with specifically it will be like oh, your shots three hundred frames but it's actually four hundred because it's one hundred frames of handles so there's that I'm going back in my day okay you wanna take one more uh no, I think we could jump I just have to turn off my mirroring or turn on my mirroring okay, so we have our shots and here we have stark start being weirded out oh something's going on there let's find it that's kind of weird is kind of fun fast let's let's let's go there I think that'll work we get stark he looks over let's make that happen faster stark's not into it at all. We're gonna do this so sloppy because why not? But bill really is phil's really into it? This is on the internet forever, bill okay, so two totally different locations but we have two people completely looking at each other having kind of an awesome moment uh bomber failed all right let's go that one more time is this how you got your wife? Isn't it bill that totally works for me I don't know. I think you guys should have coffee after this. It's. Just a suggestion. There's coffee in the break room. Just take a minute and connect. You never know.