My Éclair NPR’s shutter can close down to 45°. 
I’ve been meaning to experiment with the effect.
Whoops. The NPR’s shutter closes down to 10°.
Evey war film by its nature is an anti-war film.
I just call the effect the Saving Private Ryan-cam but I’m sure there is a proper name for it.
I just hope the effect doesn’t get overused like “bullet time” (where a string of cameras take a single frame resulting in an effect of moving in 3D around a subject frozen in time, often while having bullets zip past at supersonic speed.)
Francois Truffaut (IIRC) disagreed with this, one hundred and eighty degrees. Kinetic action, he said, is so visually seductive that it’s impossible to make a truly anti-war film. I’m not sure if I completely agree, but Truffaut was a smart cookie, and there is definitely something to it.
But that’s a subject for another thread.
I don’t know if there is a name for it, but surely it does accellerate the images- and provide for a hyperfast impact ( sic ). I agree with you paul. IMHO, when he moved from Alan Daviau to Janusz Kaminski , it was as though his inner muse ( and a powerful muse it is ) said, " grow UP dammit ! "…and so he did- at least in visual methods used in his films.
Um, bullshit?
Sorry, rude and glib. I’ll make a point in a sec.
Spielberg turned SPR on its head with his tacked on ending and made it very much a pro-war film. Ever seen “The Green Berets”? There are a lot of films that are very explicitly pro-war.
I absolutely detested that technique in Gladiator.
It feels like the carchase in the new “Bourne Supremacy”
To me it always feel like they didn’t have time/talent/money enough to film a proper choreographed fight, so they film it in a jerky hazy way and no one will notice.
Funnily enough I didn’t get that feeling while watching Saving Private Ryan.
I’m chiming in on your side here, but I also got the feeling to a degree in Saving Private Ryan. I think the reason is that there are two effects going on, one in Saving Private Ryan and both in Bourne Supremecy.
The first effect is the double speed-frame dropping thing. I don’t really love it, but it doesn’t bug me that much. I think they used it heavily in Band of Brothers too; I don’t like it because all while I’m watching it I strain in harder with my eyes because I feel like I’m somehow not really catching what is happening, like something is missing or I can’t track the action properly.
The second effect, which absolutely drives me nuts, is what I like to call MTV fight scenes. As you said, that consists of jerky hazy filming, constant camera cuts (he throws a punch, it blurs out, oh look, there’s a puppy, snap to the clock on the wall, there’s a flash of light, look, another puppy, grunting sound with suggestion that someone is being kneed, some strange flash, oh, a car just came through the house, etc.). It was also in Gladiator to a degree, but I haven’t seen it worse than in the Bourne Supremecy.
I agree that it makes for gross action scenes - let’s make the action seem heavy by constantly cutting the camera to flashes of things slamming into each other. What, we don’t actually have to show punches connecting or people engaged in choreographed fighting; why that’s just a little bonus for the filmmaker.
I have no say in this discussion. But seeing the title over the last few dyas has been driving me *batty * to come in here and say this:
“Timmy, do you like movies about Gladiators?”
The rapid cutting is more noticeable in “Bourne Supremacy” because the film is shot hand-held. There are precious few tripod shots, zero Steadicam shots and few crane shots that I could find. It’s a choice. -shrug-
I would disagree with your assessment that the car chase was not choreographed. I am here to tell you that every single shot, car turn, angle and stunt was choreographed. Perhaps even with a video-storyboard system. One does not make a car chase out of thin air. It won’t cut. One does not do a single high-speed ( or, low-speed ) car bit without stunt drivers, permits to close streets and highways, extras and careful framing and planning.
Aesthetically, I’m with you. The work was shoddy-looking. Technically you are plain wrong. As for SPR, there was copious use of Steadicam as well as good smoothly worked hand-held. There are lots of shots that were shot on tripod, with little to no movement by the camera. The action took place within the frame. There is a lot of very good on-the-beach point of view work in the opening sequence as well. I read the article on that movie several times. Each shot was planned. Each gag, each explosion, each body flying and “dismembered part” was plotted and placed carefully.
-sigh- I am repeating myself. There is no such thing as an unplanned shot on a feature film. On can go out with a small unit ( camera op, assistant a grip ) and “steal” shots sometimes. Long lens or street scenes that don’t require photo releases. Otherwise, every single moment you see on a movie or t.v. show has been meticulously planned.
Trust me. It took 7 weeks, 5 days a week, 14 hours a day minimum to shoot a feature film I shot in 1995. The film ran an hour and a half. It was all shot within a few square miles. That’s a very short schedule these days…
Cartooniverse
I understand where you are coming from, I think I meant something different than you with “unchoreographed.” I fully agree with your post that everything is planned out; I’m simply saying that it is not as difficult when you do not have to choreograph long fight scenes or car chases where the footage actually watches the characters gracefully or savagely fight. Rather than having an actor need to actually jump over a leg sweep, successfully land, and then throw a roundhouse kick on balance, all on one stretch of film focused on the actors, you can cut and splice your way there with suggestion. My point was that it is a cheap way out of having to succesfully film a complex and long sequence, not that it isn’t planned.
Great post by the way; interesting to get the insider’s perspective.
Oh gosh. Accept my apologies, I really did misunderstand you up there ! Glad my post shed a smidgen of light.
Funny you mention heavy cutting. In the bathroom today, I was reading the magazine coverage in A.C. of “The Matrix”, and how the brothers who wrote and directed it felt very strongly that their fight scenes had to flow, to show leaps, moves and connections without excessive cutting. Yes, there’s a ton of cuts in the fights in “The Matrix”. But frequently a flurry of blows, leaps, kicks, recoveries and landings are shown in a single shot.
That is by design and surely more difficult. It also has huge impact on the viewer, opposed to the cut-up fight scenes most of us are used to.
Look at “Bullitt”. Amazing car chase right? Some short cuts, some looooong takes with chasing happening. It builds emotionally the more you see the two cars chasing in the same frame for more than a few seconds.
I suppose this is because it is how we experience life. Nobody lives life in edits, and yet rare is the film that has none. Hitchcock’s “Rope” is a rare example of a film with no edits… “Russian Ark” is another one.
One thing that bugs me about the “frame-dropping” effect is that even for relatively long cuts in fight scenes, I get the impression that it’s a little bit of a visual cheat: that it allows you to film a physical fight scene with the actors fighting at half-speed, and then speed up the action to faster-than-life. That the frame-dropping effect is so distinctive that it masks any of the other visual “hints” that would normally give away the fact that you’re replaying the scene back faster than it was filmed.
“The Patriot” DVD had some behind-the-scenes footage on it, and I remember noticing that they filmed Mel Gibson’s fast, violent melee scenes much slower than they appeared in the movie. And sure enough in the movie, all those scenes had the jerky, frame-dropped effect.
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What is a “visual cheat”? It’s a movie, not a documentary. The entire film is a “visual cheat” unless you film it with nothing but a hand held camcorder in a single take. As long as it doesn’t LOOK like a cheat in the final product (like the computer generated Neo in Matrix: Reloaded or the sped up car chases in Mad Max movies), it’s fine with me.
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I believe the film plays back at regular speed. It just gives the impression being more kinetic because of the effect (which is the point).
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Most action looks really slow and boring at normal speed without all the “cheats”.
I just wanted to say what a wonderful and informative thread this is. Cartooniverse, is there an online glossary for movie photography terms?
This is one of the things that Hollywood has failed to understand about the hyperkinetic action style they’ve otherwise imported wholesale from Hong Kong. Despite the overpowering influence of Woo and Lam and Hung and Hark in the design of action scenes, the shooting and editing is still much more Hollywood than HK, and it doesn’t work nearly as well.
The typical Jackie Chan fight scene illustrates this: Look at the saloon fight in Shanghai Noon vs the factory fight in Drunken Master 2 — in his own work, Jackie is careful to link action together by maintaining continuity inside a shot and using the edits to bridge the movement (not to mention never shooting anything tighter than a medium closeup), whereas in Hollywood they use the edits to break up the movement into its discrete components (not to mention shoving the camera up Jackie’s bunghole). It just isn’t anywhere as effective, and it’s so painfully obvious I wonder why Hollywood hasn’t figured it out yet.
I mean, sure, when you’re working with the Charlie’s Angels girls, you have to break up the action to compensate for the stars’ mediocre fighting skills, but when you have Jet Li himself, why would you undercut his impressiveness?
applause Very well said, and spot-on. I refer to Hollywood editing as “Lethal Weapon Syndrome”. Every fight in the Lethal Weapon series of movies is hyper-edited-closeup that just leaves you scratching your head wondering what is happening. Using quick cuts and jerky cameras is the lazy way to try and create immersive action, as the viewer is instead reacting to the “excitement” of the editing technique instead of the substance of what is being filmed. With the latest crop of movie directors being graduates of the music video industry, I fear for the future of action movies in Hollywood.