Cinematography : Motivated camera movement matters by Vital Butinar

Recently I was working on a few different projects as part of the crew and while I loved getting paid for once I was also able to observe the professionals at work.

Of course what was being shot looked great but a couple of things did stand out and made me think, mostly because these are things I always think about while working on our projects.

One thing was how unprepared the crew actually was, since they only had a storyboard of the shots and no shot list or shooting schedule. This resulted in moving equipment around and then back to get a similar shot which could have been avoided if the appropriate preproduction was done and would have saved a lot of time.

I've seen this in our own project because when done well it saves you a bunch of time and unnecessary movement of equipment which we always have to take advantage of because we usually don't have the luxury of time.

But the other one was camera movement which is what this post is about.

I heard the director and DP talk about every shot if it was a dolly push in or pull out or a side to side or a locked of shot or from a tripod and all the shots looked great.

But the only thing I actually never heard was why a camera movement was made. The simple question of why are we pushing into the frame or pulling out. Why are we moving the camera from side to side.

All this made me think because on our projects I usually work with my partner Leya who's usually the DP and figure out what we're shooting and how and what is being expressed with the shot. This results in a lot of shots being the way they are because their movement is motivated by the action and the expression of emotion intended for the scene. I think this is important because thinking of these kinds of things and even thinking of the edit and color grade, not ti mention the sound makes for a better final result.

So I had some fun one afternoon and shot a couple of different shots with similar action and the same location. The only difference was basically the intention for making a camera move.

All this was done very quickly because I simply don't have time went into it so please forgive the simplicity of the shots.

But it got me thinking that a lot of low budget movies that just so happen to be dramas, seem to use pretty simple shots. Most of the time shots are locked down and static, I think because it's simple and people just use the already light location that they've got. I did this too.

Then there's something I call the hallmark dolly shot which I've seen in some really nice looking TV movies. When a lot of the time they just stick the camera on a dolly and drive it side to side so that the shot looks a little more interesting then just a locked down shot.

At the same time the same side to side dolly movement can be a great tool to use to show time progression and I've used this technique before, when we even stuck a candle in the four ground and for every sequential shot we shortened it to give the feeling that time was passing.

Then there's the dolly movement that I personally love which is used to reveal something, like someone spying on someone else.

Just for good measure I tried the same shot handheld to illustrate that the same type of shot as before can be done very cheaply without the need of a dolly or even a gibal.

Of course I didn't do a push in or pull out because I simply didn't see any use for them but it was a fun little experiment in either case.

So I'm interested in hearing more how everyone planes their shots?

Are your shots motivated most of the time or do you just wait until you get ready for a shot and then think about what would be the coolest way to make the shot look good?

Hope everyone is having a great start of the week.