The thread about shaky-cam reminded of another technique that needs to die. You get a scene where two people are talking (usually standing) and the camera goes around and around in circles around them (and around, and around, and around. . . . repeat about 50 times).
That is one of the most utterly pointless things ever devised.
Those directors are incredibly lucky that stupidity is not a crime.
The revolving point of view has some value: it gives the full scope of a scene. But, yeah, some people use it way too much.
(Peter Jackson overuses it in The Hobbit movies.)
The technique I think I hate the most is the close-up on someone in a scary place, so the monster can jump out at them from right up close to their face. In some contexts, this is really stupid.
e.g., character is in a big empty warehouse or hangar or somewhere. There isn’t any way the monster can sneak up on them. But when the camera pulls way in for a close-up, the monster can jump out from the edge of the frame! The monster sneaks up on the viewer, much more than on the character.
I really detest this bit of directorial laziness.
Generally, any where we can count the pores on somebody’s face. I don’t get that close to someone unless we’re kissing or hugging, and I certainly don’t stare at them that close!
The editing, close up of gear changes and frantic wobbling in most car chase scenes really gets my goat. Yes, we know your fast editing and close ups of spinning wheels and foot to the floor driving is just giving the illusion of speed and that car is actually doing about 20. Yes, fast panning of two cars in a race gives an illusion of danger, speed and thrills, but those two cars are obviously not that close to each other, there’s no danger, they’re not even breaking any speed limits and my aged grandmother drives faster.
Unclear fights and shoot-outs are my pet peeve. We are so used to seeing it that we rarely notice it anymore but I find it very difficult to keep track of who is doing what to whom and to what end.
You do notice it when it is well done though. I think “Heat” is the high point of the shoot-out.
When the gang are retreating down the street after the big heist you got a great feel for what they were try to do in defence, what the cops were doing, where they were coming from and the overall direction and flow of the scene. It felt like the most realistic gun battle I’ve ever seen on film and I recall that ex-SAS man Chris Ryan (AKA Andy McNab) was involved in the choreography so maybe that attention to detail paid off.
I wouldn’t say it drives me berserk or anything, but the cliche’d shot of someone getting out of a vehicle that starts off by focusing on their shoes, to show that they’re female, or happen to like cowboy boots, or whatever.
This.
As much as I love The Walking Dead, they are guilty of this all the time. Characters are walking along in a forest or some road or plain, visibility is a quarter mile in each direction, and the camera zooms out and suddenly there’s a zombie. Unless they’re all nearsighted and partially deaf, it makes absolutely no sense
Lens flare. Especially when I’m supposed to be immersed in the scene. My eyes don’t have lens flare on a normal basis. So when I see lens flare, I think “oh, right, it’s through a camera” taking the effect of verisimilitude out of the scene.
Yeah that’s a good one. I was watching Oblivion again and there’s a scene where Tom Cruise is speaking to Morgan Freeman. All of a sudden ZING! Jaime Lannister is standing behind Cruise with a gun at his head.
Keep in mind, they are standing in the middle of a gravel pit. There is literally no way the character could have crossed a hundred yards of broken rocks in a split second without making a sound.
You mad JJ Abrams cry.
Which reminds me - I hate the “snap zoom” effect. They did this a lot in Battlestar Galactica, Avatar and Firefly, but I’ve seen it elsewhere as well. Basically, you start with a wide action shot of a space battle or jungle or something. All of a sudden, the camera will quickly zoom to whatever it is the director wants to focus your attention on. A dangerous animal/monster. A spaceship on a collision course for you. Some “boss” villain who is about to kick ass. Whatever.
I think it’s supposed to give the impression that there’s someone there with a camera who all of a sudden sees something of interest.
I hate it when they have two idiots standing about five feet apart and pointing guns at each other and talking instead of shooting.
I keep hoping that they would both shoot.
This actually had a purpose once (see Notorious for reference). When there was a 3-second kiss rule, a la the Hays Code, panning around the kissing couple could extend the kiss to 3 seconds of lip-lock, back of head, 3 more seconds of lip-lock, more back of head, and 3 more seconds of lip-lock.
Aaaghhhhhh! double for CGI lens flare.
The two-overlapping-circles shot to indicate someone looking through binoculars. (Hey filmmakers - you can just show us one circle, like the character would actually see. If there’s any confusion, we’ll figure out what’s going on when you cut to a shot of the character holding the binoculars.)
Among recent films, I thought Nightcrawler handled this well - as befits a movie about cameramen…
Like the circling camera, I can see how this might be valuable if used very sparingly. In a space battle, it could emulate computer battle control, where the ship’s main screen might very well be programmed to zoom in, in just this way.
(Jellicoe would have loved having it at Jutland, or Nelson at Trafalgar!)
But, like pepper, a little goes a long way, and too much is too damn much.
They’re getting a little better at that; they still show two overlapping circles, but they overlap more these days than they did in the 1950s! Instead of a very overt figure eight, it’s more of an oval.
(In much the same way, spaceship “whoosh” noise is getting a little more subtle. It’s still there, but just not quite as overt as it was on Star Trek.)
Yes, this really pisses me off too. Be it people, monsters, space ships, when they basically have a tenth of a second each slide show with various close-ups, angles, impacts…and you know it’s just to keep them from actually “creating” the scene in it’s entirety.
I think by this point it’s just sort of hackneyed.
Here’s an example from Star Trek: In to Darkneess
Whoa! I see what you mean! I would have zoomed also…but not that way! The zoom is slow, then super fast, then slow again. It looks really artificial.
(In real life, it looks like someone with a digital camera going from lens magnification to digital magnification. You can even see a little loss of resolution!)
ETA: do you think that might have been the effect they intended? As if one of those civilians on the street were using a personal camera, and this was supposed to be what they saw?
I love this. Amen.
This isn’t exactly a movie technique, but it’s a camera thing that happens in cooking shows, which I like to watch (particularly Barefoot Contessa Ina Garten’s show). When the camera gets SO CLOSE to whatever is being chopped, sliced, minced* that you can’t even hardly tell what it is. And when the lens is right up IN the pot of <whatever>… it makes me want to scream, “Back up, so I can see WTF she’s doing!”
*I guess this could also apply to slasher films, or what Joe Bob Briggs used to call “teen-age pork chop movies.”
O Gosh, the DANCING thing. For decades here, before we had “Dancing with the stars” and entertainment competitions, we had a TV channel, slightly similar to Public Television, that showed sport Dance competition. By focusing on the face and shoulders of the competitors. It was a minority sport, with limited audience.
To the amazment of the arts/entertainment community, when the commercial stations started showing dance competitions and showing the feet, many more people started watching.
… And I saw a Dolly Parton arena concert where she turned to face different sections of the audience. But the production crew were ready for that!
Every 5 seconds, as she turned away from the camera, they’d switch to the next wide-angle shot and zoom down to her face.
And don’t get me started on fliming of stage productions.