It’s been done in one way or another for decades. It’s just now that it’s become stylistically obsequious. Cause and effect with smart phones? Why not? Crazier things have been related.
Well, I think the look was becoming popular well before cell phone video was ubiquitous but I’m sure cell phone video has at least somewhat helped it along its way to audiences tolerating it. One show where it was a little distracting for me was Friday Night Lights (2004), and that was before cell phone video was really becoming popular. Hell, I didn’t even have a phone that took decent still photos at that time.
Except they don’t really look like celphone footage. And they do look like documentary footage.
And note in a lot of cases, its not just the hand-held effect that’s made to invoke a documentary. Stuff like the Office (in the first season anyways) was explicitly supposed to be a fake documentary. And shows like Parks and Rec and Modern Family have not just hand held cams, but pull the characters aside for “interviews” a la reality shows*.
*(actually, now that I think about it, I’m almost positive that the massive popularity of reality shows is the reason for the ubiquity of the hand-held look. Audiences are so used to the conventions of reality shows that they quickly accept them in scripted shows. I doubt most people even question who the hell is interviewing the members of a random Modern Family on that show, for example).
Woody Allen used it the most in the beginning (1980s). He wasn’t the only one, but it was a trademark of his.
Used in moderation, I don’t mind, and it can certainly lend an air of immediacy and urgency to an action scene. I’ve never gotten motion sickness as a result of wobbly-cam overuse, as I’ve read some other people do, but if it’s done too much I do find it a bit annoying.
I like it when it’s used in moderation for one scene or something to create an effect
I hate it when the whole show is done like that
I blame Modern Family. that really seemed to make it popular
and The Office
Forgetting the ‘wobbly cam’ issue for a moment, I have to ask were you a fan of The Office? Because Parks and Recreation’s style of comedy was exactly the same. And I don’t just mean the fake-documentary camera work but the writing, the performances, everything. In fact P&R started development as a spin-off of Rashida Jones’ Office character. And I found both shows to be exemplary examples of intelligent comedy (as opposed to crap like Two and A Half Men or 2 Broke Girls or Two Drooling Idiots etc.)
As far as wobbly cam goes, it’s never bothered me. Like anything it can get over-used, but overall I find cinéma vérité to be an effective style of film making. It really enhances smart, deadpan, faux-documentary comedies like those mentioned. I even loved its used in the battle sequences in the Battlestar Galactica reboot. It added a fresh element to otherwise stock CGI stuff. I’ve never suffered from the ‘motion sickness’ issue either (I loved Blair Witch).
Out of random curiosity, did the British version of The Office do the faux-reality show thing, or was that an innovation of the American version?
Yes, it was also shot in mockumentary style.
KFC had a series of annoying ads that were shot in “cell phone” style.
About wobbly/shaky cameras:
I don’t get how people call this a “documentary style”. Ever seen a documentary? They don’t look like that. I guess “handheld” is more accurate, although that should then not be confused with “without a tripod”, as reality shows are typically shot without a tripod, but I assume with a larger camera off the shoulder rather than actually handheld. But go look at a show like Survivor. Yes, the camera moves a little because it’s not on a tripod, and once in a while they move to catch something that’s happening outside the frame, but they’re trying to minimize the resulting instability rather than emphasize it like on Parks and Rec or the new BSG.
In PG-13 action movies they tend to use shakycam to make sure you can’t actually see the violence so they can get away with more of it without losing the PG-13 rating. Of course in a movie like Transformers I can’t tell (let alone care) which heap of CGI metal is pounding which other heap of CGI metal even if the camera would be completely still.
I tried to rewatch the 2009 Star Trek a while ago, but I couldn’t because of the way the camera is used and it’s edited: like a TV commercial. Not sure about the camera stability, but it’s constantly zoomed way in, cutting back and forth very quickly. This made me very worried about the new Star Wars, because the old Star Wars is quite the opposite: many long, wide shots. Fortunately, JJ Abrams used those in the new SW, although some action is still slightly too tight and too quickly cut for my tastes, but not to such a degree that it’s a distraction.
Note that it makes a big difference how you see a show or a movie. I recently got myself a projector, so now I see movies and many TV shows projected on my wall. This makes excessive camera movement very unpleasant, while you’d barely notice when watching the same thing on a cell phone. For instance, I never had a problem with Storage Wars when watching it on my TV, but the camera is too frantic on the wall. But at least they’re not going out of their way to make it worse, like on Parks and Rec, BSG and NYPD Blue.
About comedy:
My favorite sitcom ever is Ned & Stacey from 1995. I also like NewsRadio a lot, and Friends could be really funny in its hey day, they had very good writing. It’s not easy to make a dumb character funny, but they managed with Joey. Also see Home Improvement (mostly funny) and all of its imitators from the 2000s with loser husbands and harpy wives: not funny. I liked The Big Bang Theory and still watch it, but it has declined a lot over the years.
Cringe comedy: certainly cringeworthy, but that doesn’t make it funny. As such I can’t stand The Office. In general, I hate characters that make stupid decisions, because you can see the fallout coming miles away and that fallout is never enjoyable to watch. This is one of the reasons I hated Battlestar so much by the end.
IIRC, **HLOTS **had a reason for the handheld camera when it started – one of the characters was making a documentary. That didn’t bother me; but the camera work in The Blair Witch Project annoyed the crap out of me. Maybe because the movie was stupid *and *had wobbly-cam.
It’s like loving rollercoasters as a kid and not being able to handle them with age, in my experience. I was able to watch Project Almanac on Prime, so maybe the refresh rate lessened the eye strain I usually experience right away my television.
Shakycam is one thing, and that is annoying in itself, but could be blamed on handheld operation.
But I particularly dislike when the camera is intentionally swaying slowly, tilting, panning, in a way that is clearly controlled and deliberate. Ugh!
It’s kind of like a bass player who is always playing fancy licks instead of doing their primary job of holding the groove and providing a solid foundation for the rest of the band.
An occasional lick is fine, and welcome, but not the whole song.
The camera’s primary job is to convey the image–then “art” gets in the way and the camera is suddenly taking attention away from the actors. An occasional moment of this is fine, like salt and pepper, but not the whole show.
IIRC There was a show in the late 80s called Thirtysomething that used shaky cam a lot.
By “documentary style” I mean more like hand-held news footage or something to evoke a feeling of reality, but it also encompasses shows like The Office which really does try to mimic a documentary feel. (I mean, look up shaky cam on Wikipedia and the reasons for employing it: “Shaky cam is often employed to give a film sequence an ad hoc, electronic news-gathering, or documentary film feel. It suggests unprepared, unrehearsed filming of reality, and can provide a sense of dynamics, immersion, instability or nervousness.[4] The technique can be used to give a pseudo-documentary or cinéma vérité appearance to a film”)
I just looked up a clip of Parks and Recreation and that’s a lot shakier and zoomier than I remember. The first clip at the ice arena actually does bug me. Not so much the shakiness, but the constant zooms.
When I watch a film or TV I usually lose myself in the story.
The suddenly -SHAKY CAM- and I’m reminded that there is a camera man and an entire studio full of stage hands involved. Rally fucks up a story fast.
It just occurred to me that shaky-cam being done to create realism (oxymoron!) is the 20th-21st Century equivalent to those early novels (late 18th-early 19th Cent.) that opened with the now-mockable “this is a journal of a real person” or “this is a long-ass letter to a real person” framing device. “[Main Title] Being the Diary of the Late Cap’t R___, Recovered by the Expedition of Lt. C___ in 181_ Along With the Mortal Remains of Cap’t R___.” 
Authors outgrew the need for such a framing device as routine or ubiquitous, and now use it only once in a while intentionally and for a particular effect. I’m sure movie-makers will do the same.
I like shaky cam. Like anything, there are examples where it is overused, but it provides a sense of realism, of being there in the moment, that smooth camerawork cannot convey.
I think Paul Greengrass is the master.
Incorrect. That honor of funniest sitcom belongs, for now and all time, to Fawlty Towers, with the first two seasons of Arrested Development and Taxi as running neck and neck for a distant second place. Parks and Recreation is, however, a more authentically American version of The Office than the actual American version of The Office. Practically speaking, you can extract 90% of the genuine humor by skimming through YouTube.com clips of Chris Pratt and Audrey Plaza, punctuated with occasionally pearls of wisdom from Ron Swanson about the evils of government and his obsessive need for privacy. (His response to Plaza’s character telling him to look on Google Maps for his house was the single best scene in the series.) Also, pass entirely on the pointless seventh season.
As for “shaky cam” it is intended to replicate the cinéma vérité of a documentary feature and has been used for decades to good effect to add a sense of immediacy to a scene, such as in Italian neorealistic films like La battaglia di Algeri or to emphasize the stress of warfare as in The Hurt Locker. Ironically, the technique has been somewhat deprecated among documentary filmmakers (except in ambush interviews and other shooting that requires handheld cameras) precisely because of its overuse in entertainment films. Since Parks and Rec is supposed to be a kind of slice of life documentary-styled show it is appropriate but it was frequently overused. Although it is often claimed to be “easier” to set up a handheld shot than the standard fixed single camera staging, it actually requires most skill and communication on the part of the cameraman and director to make sure that the camera captures the action as intended versus blocking a static set where the cameraman simply has to operate the fixed camera as the actors simply hit their marks.
Stranger