I should have posted this ages ago. What is it with Hollywood, and this technique to spin (instead of pan) the camera around the character talking? I WAG it started with ER, and I got nauseous. Do we really need this?
Pass the “drama-mene”,
- Jinx
It started well before ER, though I can’t credit any specific movie. For the longest while it was poorly used as a shot because it took a great deal of planning (dollies, cranes, etc.). Then came the Steadicam, the key tool of ER cinematography, and all of a sudden it was very easy to remove the static nature of smooth shots (handheld shots – the easily portable shots – tended to shake and depend on the steady hand of the cameraman. This became less shaky as time went on and cameras became smaller, but no cameraman is perfect. Tripod shots were the quickest way to ensure a steady picture, and you can easily move a tripod on a dolly, but that kind of thing is slightly more inconvenient when compared to a Steadicam).
Now, you get the advancement of computers in movies like the Matrix, and the legendary “spinning around the frozen kick” shot (which required thirty-six cameras and a really frickin’ powerful computer) and all of a sudden people are reminded of the interactive nature of a moving camera.
Guy Ritchie added to the formula with sped up film and slo mo film that didn’t regard previous orthadoxy, and Steven Spielberg has a hallmark shot that distills the beauty of a spinning camera: a lowline camera slowly closing in on the upward faces of the characters, usually with a swell of dramatic music and at the moment of some significant realization. Lost World is an amazing study of how you can make a great shot shitty by using it every six minutes.
Handheld spinning cameras, along the lines of Dogme95 and the Blair Witch Project, irritate the piss out of me because they’re so shaky. They don’t make me dizzy, but they seem to remove some of the professionalism that makes a movie enjoyable for me. I can only imagine this is the same kind of effect ER would have on me, even with a Steadicam, as a constantly moving camera with few edits would bother me just as much. Too much like a home video.
So how do they do that shot where there’s a person on a hilltop, and the shot starts very close in, and pulls back quite far, spinning around the whole time? It’s clearly filmed from a helicopter, due to where it finishes up, but that just seems like it would be way to complicated to pull off in reality. Particularly the mega-huge zoom from an unstable platform part.
This used to be, to me, a signature of Brian De Palma movies. Watch “Body Double” and you’ll see what I mean.
Smackfu, IANA director but I can think of a couple ways this might be done. I don’t know if these are how it’s really done but here goes.
A fairly large construction type crane could be used in concert with a zoom lensed camera on the boom. Start with with the boom near the actor with the lens fully zoomed to get a closeup. As the boom moves away, zoom the lens out so you end with a wide-angle shot from some distance away.
A fairly small, remote control helicopter carrying a camera could get the complete shot without generating enough wind to make its presence obvious. Start in a hover near the actor and go from there.