Impulse

When I’m shooting stills, I spend a lot of time simply watching. When I see an interesting moment, I lift my camera, wait for it, snap a few shots, then put my camera down and return to watching. I see another moment best shot from another spot, I move and snap a few more.

When shooting video, I can’t stand around so much. Remember that viewers expect me to show them all the key moments within a scene, leaving no gaps. I never get to put the camera down: I start rolling and continue watching - through the camera - to see what happens. I move and adapt from moment to moment, always rolling so as to not miss something. It can be exhausting because I’m shooting continuously. I’m watching, while keeping the camera interestingly framed, while listening intently to dialog for any cues for what’s coming next. I only put down the camera when it looks like there is no possibility of anything interesting happening.

The tricky part is figuring out what’s going to be interesting. A scene that took place while filming RAAM showed me how interesting scenes often begin with the most mundane moments.

The day before the start of the race, the RAAM bicyclists were required to register in person, and as usual, I came along to film it. The registration room was terrible for audio: concrete walls & floor, lots of people. It was hard to pick out one voice amongst the din, so I stopped shooting. The scene was mundane anyway - they were just shuffling papers, filling out forms. Everything was in order except the riders couldn’t find the insurance papers for the vehicles. Again, it seemed minor so I didn’t shoot it. But the minor problem became major as problems do. The racers couldn’t ride without the papers. A massive search of the registration area ensued as I finally started rolling. Tensions began to rise. One rider ran back to the motor home to get his wife who had organized the paperwork. She arrived, baby on her hip, out of breath, eyes wild in worry. She scanned the table, spotting a stack of papers. “Here they are!”, she declared. “Vehicle one, two, and three!” She dropped a bundle of paper before the official with each count. Later, another rider calmed the husband, still tense that anything was amiss: “Look, we’ve got three thousand miles to get mad at each other, let’s just stay calm and enjoy this.”

It’s an interesting scene that shows how nervous these guys were before the race. But, I didn’t get the first moment of the scene. “Where are your insurance papers?” “umm, I don’t know…” If you look at my footage, you’ll never know what they were arguing about or why it was a big deal. The scene is incomplete, and I’m not sure if I can use it. If I were shooting with a still camera, you wouldn’t have noticed the missing moment.

So, I started filming all the time. Often, I’d leave the camera rolling even when I put it down. Tape is cheap. Missing a moment is expensive. Driven by that temporal component I described in my last post, I knew I had to catch every salient moment of each scene. I had to be ready to shoot, always. In time, luckily, I started to develop my sense of when a trifle would become a catastrophe.

Camera movement is another temporal component that challenged me. Camera moves direct the viewer’s attention. I become very aware of this while filming. When I’m filming and see something coming that I want to shoot from somewhere else, I need to make a snap decision: Do I go ahead and move the camera, knowing that it will draw the viewer’s attention away from what’s going on? (but, if I’m lucky, it’ll draw their attention to something new). Or, cut filming and restart from a new position? Or, go ahead and move, planning to edit out the movement? Or, wait and hope something visually happens that makes my camera move natural (like the subject saying, “look - up in the sky!”)? Or, finally, I might decide that subject of the scene will return quickly to where I am, thus I’ll stay put, rolling. I have to make a decision like this every few seconds. With my still camera, I can just drop the camera and move. If it doesn’t work, I can jump back - nobody will ever see my waffling. It’s easier to experiment in stills.

Also, I’m filming people. I’d have a beautiful shot and someone in it would move, spoiling the composition. I can’t just move and re-frame simply because I think it’ll look better. The viewer will feel the camera move and expect the attention to shift. Unmotivated camera movement is what gives video that amateurish, home-movie feel. (Watch and you’ll see: Home movies are shot from the point of view of whoever holds the camera. Professional movies are shot from the point of view of the viewer. This is true even in a “Point-Of-View” shot: the camera may be the shark’s POV, but it’s really the audience’s POV of the shark’s POV).

At first, with all this weighing on my mind, I shot really wimpy compositions of people in conversation. Sometimes I’d frame on one person and listen for lull in the conversation to switch to the other person. The problem is that people don’t take turns when talking to each other. Conversation is overlapped and flowing. Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for a break to cut on, so I’d end up watching one person for a whole conversation. Other times, I’d chicken out and shoot the pair from the side so I wouldn’t have to move as much. This is a really, really boring shot. Had I been using my still camera, I’d flit about, snapping shots and ignoring the conversation.

As with predicting interesting moments, I gradually got more comfortable with the flow of dialog and began letting my camera flow with the discussion. I realized that this is how I’d perceive the dialog had I been participating in it: I’d be standing there, looking back and forth, listening to each person. I composed more aggressively, re-framing in quick moves when it felt natural.