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Shoot: Detail Shots

Once you start to do details, then it becomes this incredibly absorbing and actually very exciting aspect of shooting video. It is that opposite of looking around and using my peripheral vision and saying, "I'm gonna look at just how does the light play off these glasses, and when you change angles, and then when a hand comes in, or a machine does something," or whatever it may be. It's that idea of going almost not microscopic, but so close, and there's a precision to it. There's a beauty to it. There's a visual beauty that in some ways is hard to replicate in other ways. So details, details, details. Can't express how important that is. And again, you need time. Obviously, you need time to do that. Where you're rushed, and you're trying to get the sense of play set up shots, and you have to do your interview, and so forth and so on, details might be the thing that fall by the waistside, but I would urge you to not let that happen. Take that extra time. Play with your angles, and just...

look for the graphic elements. So this next piece is gonna be some footage of us shooting details, and there's also no audio, I believe. So, we can talk about it. You get the annotated version. (laughs) Okay. I mean that's a good example quite frankly of I'm already focused getting details of the violin, and I allow him to enter frame, and start motion happening, and there you see. And in this case, Julie's choice was a 50 millimeter 14I nominal. We're not suppose to have our gear, but a very shallow depth of field. I find shooting details as I get more and more into it, I love working with, we have a 400 mil, but like a really long lens, where you, again, you know what details can do. They can be descriptive, like this is a case where you're achieving a certain amount of intimacy of the action, of his process, of the craftsmanship in this case. When you put a really long lens on and get even tighter, what you do is you show things that the eye doesn't see. So, you almost create a new world. As a viewer, I hope it's exciting, but as the shooter, it's thrilling. Yeah, this film I was just working on where I would say 80% of the B-roll was shot with a 400 mil lens, and I went to places I never been before, and then you just start to see how light plays off and little bits of movement change things, and then movement in and out of the frame with your characters or whatever it may be. So again-- I'd like you to take note actually just because I want you to see how long the shots are I'm shooting. They're really long. So, I'm doing that for a couple of reasons, one because I don't know exactly what he's going to do next, and I don't know which bits of this I might use. I've got a cut away that's tight on his face, so I know I've got a cut away, but it's also because I don't know how much I need to cover. So, it may be that I want longer shots to cover, and there's that shot that Ed got from outside, beautiful. If we weren't rushed, I would've spent a lot more time on this. And one thing I did was I used the ... I used my microphone, my shotgun mic against the window, (audience ahs) so that I could try to be as smooth with the sort of skit. So, you find all these different ways to look like Spielberg. No. (audience laughs) Not. You can see also that Ed is incredibly steady just handheld and using the icup also to stabilize, whereas I'm not. I shoot very differently than he does. You see I'm on a monopad. I've got it in a pouch. It's also because the weight of the camera for me is too much to hold steady. I just don't have the upper body strength, so I have to do that. I like a monopad because it gives me a lot of maneuvering space, so it's as close to handheld without being fully handheld that I can manage. And I know a lot of women, this is a challenge. If you're shooting, it is a challenge, and I don't like shooting tripod. I feel stuck when I have a tripod. But if you can work with a tripod, like if it doesn't hamper your style, it's obviously a great way to hold really steady. We don't do the shoulder rigs. That's obviously also another great way to hold steady. Yeah, so with details, you need patience, which means you need time. I think with all of this, time seems to be the biggest factor in our lives as filmmakers or as journalists, whatever, that the more time you have, the more you can take a breath and see more deeply and spend more time, try different things when you're in a rush. The practical side of it is it's important if you're gonna be doing client work, which I assume most people need to do, you also need to know how to work quickly and problem solve and make decisions on the run. Like in the case of this shoot, we had example amount of time within the day because we had to ... Takumi, the young violinist, was coming at a certain time, and then we had to go to meet him in the studio later in the day to record, as you'll see later. So, it wasn't like a free for all day, "Oh, let's just, you know relax." It was like we had to really be on target. Anyway, and a lot of the time you're working, this is how you're working, even with personal work because you're dealing with other people's schedules and they don't necessarily have the whole day to give you. One shot that we haven't mentioned at all that please add to your list is you've got to get some shots when you're out there that you could put titles over and credits over. It is so damn easy to forget that. So, you need that and it's got to be a tripoded shot because when a shot is moving, it is really obvious because the text is static. So, it's so easy to forget. I shot some stuff that I thought would work to put titles over in the afternoon shoot we did with our violinist, but it's just one of those things that is very easy to come back into your edit session and realize that you were so busy trying to catch the action that you forgot to get just a graphic backdrop for text. So, let's talk about that timing, length of a shot. So just to step back with the details, you were saying hold them for a while, what would you say, about 20 seconds? Yeah. A lot of that stuff I was holding, yeah, easily 20 seconds. Right, so just think about that 20 seconds. Then for the titles, what would you call that? Like a visual bed for titles. For titles, that's a-- I would also-- 30, 60 seconds even. Well, you wouldn't need that long. But let's say at least 30 seconds. Yeah. Right, better to go long than to go short. And yes, absolutely on the tripod, or you saw with one shot, I placed it on the table, or you place it on the floor, but the idea is absolutely steady. No movement. No movement at all-- Yeah. For the title shot. Minimal, minimal movement. You'll correct with a warp stabilizer in editing, but you would be better off not having a problem to correct, ideally. That's almost like saying you're gonna fix the exposure in post. Better to nail the exposure, than having to clean up your mistakes. On a short sheet like this, like you said time is kind of of the essence. So, I'm curious how you balance getting the essential shots? Him not walking, you may not use it, but you know it's good to have, balancing that with also allowing time for you to just be creative and kind of experiment and know that maybe you might be missing a couple essentials, but is worth it in the end to kind of have that, I don't know, great shot that don't is gonna exist because you didn't have that time to play around? Yeah. I think everyone works differently and thinks differently. I am someone who likes to schedule, even if it's just in my head, even if I'm not making it a formal announcement to the whole crew or my subject, but sometimes you do need to do that too. So for me it would be like, "Okay, we're gonna get there at 9 o'clock, 11 o'clock." The subject's arriving. Takumi, the violinist's arriving, so we have two hours. So, what do we need to do in those two hours? We need to do the A-roll interview. We want to do that first. How much time roughly do we think we're gonna need? I'm starting to plot it out. That doesn't mean that at 20 minutes, I'm saying, "Okay, we're done," but I'm trying to plot it out 'cause what it does for me ... And again, everybody works differently. For some people, it might be the exact opposite, that you don't even think about time. You just flow with things, but that would make me incredibly anxious because the mark of being a professional is you get it. Yeah. And even if it's uncomfortable for me, even if it's not the ideal way I'd like to work or think, bottom line is the end of the day, I need it in the can. And when it's my personal work, it's almost on a deeper level in some weird way, even if I'm not being paid for it. You know what I mean? Because often you only have one shot. So anyway, you need to figure out for yourselves. And everyone out there, you need to figure out for yourself what is your MO? What is going to work best for you? And then the other thing that's important is not to translate that, tension isn't the right word, but anxiety or stress that you might be feeling onto your subject. Right. Or even the people you're working with. You need to find a way to manage that, so that you're on track in the course of this day. You get your interview, you get your B-roll, you get your details, you get your scenics, you get your place setting, you get other subject coming in for that bit of time. You include travel time in that. That's how you have to be thinking. I always feel that doing this work, you're part logistician, you're part artist, you're part journalist or documentarian. You're wearing a number of hats. And some I think is understanding. I know I was thinking as an editor walking into the shoot. So, I was thinking if I'm going to make this have lyricism, I am gonna want to make those objects, the violins, as sensual as I can make them. So I know I walked in thinking a lot about details because I thought this is going to need to elevate on the beauty of the object. So I know that was my preoccupation when I walked in the door, which is also why I got immediately tight in with him, and tried to just get a lot of that intimacy with the object because I knew that I couldn't have too much of that. And even despite how much I shot of that, when I went to edit, I was still thinking, "Oh, I used that shot already." "I need another." "I wish I had two other shots." So, it's still never enough. You can't have too many details. It's impossible to have too many detail shots coming out. So to your point, many people will think about like a five shot rule or something where it's like I get the wide, the medium, the action, the reaction, and one over the shoulder, or one creative. So once you kind of do your five shot, then you play. So some of it is the more you shoot, the more confident you are that, "Yeah, I nailed it." "I got the wide." "I don't need to go back there." The less confident you are, the more you overshoot because you don't think you got it, and that's okay. That's part of the process, and better to overshoot than undershoot because it would be pretty lousy to get back and you really didn't nail. So the funny thing is, just to confess upfront, like we saw a preshoot video earlier where the creative live crew got this lovely pan with a very wide lens of his shop. And when I say that, I was like, "Damnit, I didn't get that shot." She has let me live it down for the last 48 hours. (laughs) So, I wish I had that, I wish I had that. So, you're still not gonna get it all. You're still gonna mess up something or wish you had or whatever. You do your best, and you can use the five shot just to feel like, "Okay, I know I have it." It was a little hard to get a truly wide shot in that little shop. So, that was also why I know to my eye, I wasn't seeing a really wide shot. And then when I saw the creative live crew shot, I was like, "Well, there it was, duh." You know? Cool. I've just got a quick one. Is there any kind of rule of thumb that you try and follow for how much time you want to spend shooting B-roll for a certain length of film? So if you want to cover three minutes or five minutes, how much time might you schedule for B-roll? That's a great question 'cause it has more to do with how many scenes are you gonna try to fit in. If you're working on a confined schedule such as a client job with a budget as I showed with one of these James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award videos, two days of shooting, and they are two very full days. We usually will have multiple situations because within that three, four minute video, it should look like you shot for several days. I always know it when I watch a video that is one situation and I think, "Oh, they shot that in one day, huh?" That's interesting. Because there's a redundancy of visuals. It doesn't take a lot. Somebody could just change their clothing and it feels like you shot on multiple days. So I know I'm thinking about having variety of scenes being very important to me. For example, we were rushed in David's shop, so I think we got a lot of great material for a limited amount of time to do an interview, exteriors, interiors. And then Ed and I split up, and he actually went and got some scenics of the Seattle skyline while I stayed and did details. He got a scene setter to place us in Seattle. So, we were able within one shoot day to cover the situation, but we were definitely rushing. Oh, then on top of it, we came back here to shoot a setup shot with the young violinist. So, that normally would've not happened within such a limited amount of time. You'll tell us whether it shows in the finished product. Normally, I would give at least two shoot days to a client job, unless the client says, "We don't have the budget for that." "You've got to do it in one day." "This is a nonnegotiable." I've even been know to go back and just put in a little extra time because I want it to look good, and I like clients who return. The bottom line is you want steady clients. You don't want one off clients. If you go that extra bit, they do come back 'cause they understand that you took it seriously. You cared about what you were doing. I can't do things that are less than my own standard, so I'll put in extra time. With finished films, it's not unusual that you will have something like 100 hours of footage for a 1 hour film. That is not unusual. So, that's a pretty acceptable ratio. I know people who do films that are more verite. You could have 600 hours of footage to get down to the 1 hour or hour and a half. So, it depends also are you trying to tell things through verite scenes 'cause that takes a lot more time. You have to shoot so much 'cause you don't know when the moments will happen. If you are ... Also, we end up going out and doing pick up shots. After I've done an edit, there may be some holes that I say you know we really need to go back and get the scenics now, or we really have to go back to David's shop. If we had two more hours with him, we could cover all of this. I know people that get hired by Nat-G or Discovery to produce films. They'll do all the interviewing, and lay down the narration, and then go out and shoot everything else. So, they are shooting to script as opposed to the way we work where script is built from footage.