Hi everyone.
I've been a little away last couple of weeks because I'm dealing with some thing in my life that require a lot more energy and at the end of the day there's not much left.
But recently Leya and I were asked to shoot a short scene recreation by a friend and again decided to make it into a short film.
The plan was to use multiple cameras to capture a dialog scene making it easier for the actors to improvise and easier to edit which in a way it is but I spotted a really big problem.
Just a couple of weeks before I was working as a camera operator on a tv show shoot where multiple cameras were used.
All though I operated the steady cam most of the time I have noticed why I prefer using a single camera on projects with a low budget or no budget.
When you have no budget the only thing you can do to one up your production value is to cheat wherever possible and that means taking advantage of anything you can.
In this case shoot one side of the dialog at a nice angle and the shoot the coverage at another pleasing angle which doesn't really have to match the 180° rule that would be inherently present when working with multiple cameras. Also if the background of one other cameras is not visually pleasing a lot more work has to go into set decoration and lighting than just moving the camera and cheating a little.
Yes continuity is a bigger issue but at the same time while I'm editing it gives you the additional challenge of being creative and finding a way to make it work somehow.
So my take is that when dealing with lower budget stuff you have to cheat with one camera and not with multiple. Of course there are exceptions.
A couple of days after I started thinking of this I saw this video on youtube that talks about this subject.
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Hi Vital - thanks for sharing that helpful information and the video is insightful! Can you share the final scene you edited?
Hey Shellie Schmals thank you.
Oh of course I'll share it the moment it will be done. There's still a lot of work to be done with post and unfortunately there's another project that has seniority. :)
But I'll share it as soon as it's done, I just thought long and heard that I love cheating shots more than I like continuity of the dialogs shot on multi cam.