Dramatic Effects with a Movie Camera

Gail Segal, Sheril Antonio

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781474285841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Dirección y producción cinematográfica

The camera's capacity to organize space within a "frame" produces the fundamental unit of movie making: the shot. Dramatic Effects with a Movie Camera is a practical guide to the visual storytelling potential of different camera techniques, demonstrating how they can produce compelling shots and sequences. By exploring how a close-up shot of a character's face can help the viewer share their fear or joy, or how a moving camera can reveal plot points, connect objects and characters in space or give clues to their state of mind, Gail Segal and Sheril Antonio show how choice of shot can dramatically affect your narrative. With detailed analysis of clips from 45 films, from 30 countries, this is a unique window into how movie-making masters have made the most of their cameras – and how you can too.

1

Camerawork

Nearly everyone knows the experience of perusing vacation photographs and discovering an object or figure that went completely unnoticed at the time the picture was taken. The camera, unlike the human eye, resists endearment; it is democratic and detached. It privileges any aspect lit within the border of the frame.

Lighting is, of course, an essential element for capturing an image. Light and shade can be manipulated for creating mood, tone, style, and in the most basic way, emphasis—guiding our attention to a specific portion of the frame. For our purpose, the immediate focus is the frame—the border of the image—and the capacity of the camera to corral component parts within that border. In moviemaking, this organization translates into a sequence of shots. Sequencing different shot sizes directs the viewer’s attention, enhances story progression, and creates dramatic effects.

The shot

The still frames depicted in Figure 1.1 occur sequentially in Yasujirō Ozu’s feature film, An Autumn Afternoon. The two shots picture the same room, and yet the camera organizes space to achieve two distinct impressions. In the first image, the wall of windows is prominent and the wooden stool cushioned in red, barely visible. The second image, with different framing, emphasizes the wooden stool. The shift in emphasis highlights the way changes in composition alter perception of the same space, and in so doing, impact story development. This interaction between the placement of objects/subjects within a frame (i.e., the red-cushioned stool) and the border of the frame will drive much of our conversation (Figure 1.1).

The camera

The corralling of component parts echoes the Latin root of the word camera, which means “room” or “enclosure.” The movie camera, like the still camera, organizes space.

The shot is the most fundamental unit of filmmaking. Wide shot, medium shot, and close-up describe changes in the size of objects relative to the frame, also implying distance between the viewer and the content of the image. The perceived change in distance is accomplished through changing the camera’s position and/or the focal point of the camera lens.

Figure 1.1

An Autumn Afternoon (1962). Director: Ozu Yasujirō. Cinematographer: Yûharu Atsuta.

Variation in shot size

If we could transport ourselves to the occasion of seeing a motion picture for the first time, the sensation of seeing objects change in relative size in correlation with a movie’s plot would seem almost miraculous. The still frames from Murnau’s 1924 film, The Last Laugh, convey something of the ingenuity in manipulating image proximity, from wide shot to medium shot, or medium shot to close-up through the cut, as a way of directing the viewer’s eye. In Figure 1.2, the sequence includes an extreme wide shot, the establishing shot, which cuts to a medium wide shot of the same action.

Figure 1.3 depicts another sequence from The Last Laugh, which includes changing shot sizes. It begins with a wide shot that cuts to a medium shot, ending with a close-up of the same action.

Cinema’s pioneering directors maximized this technique, controlling the viewer’s story knowledge from moment to moment through changes in proximity and perspective.¹ It was Murnau’s film that first startled early audiences with fluid camera movements, introducing another method for adjusting proportion and expanding the means by which distance between viewer and image content might be controlled. Camera movement and the cut made changes in proximity and perspective inevitable, insuring their use and practice in the future of filmmaking. Today, after over a century of technological advances, altering the relative size of the image persists as a fundamental tool in the language of visual storytelling.

Figure 1.2

The Last Laugh (1924). Director: F.W. Murnau. Cinematographer: Karl Freund.

Figure 1.3

The Last Laugh (1924). Director: F.W. Murnau. Cinematographer: Karl Freund.

The cinematographer’s field is incommensurable. It gives you an unlimited power of creating.

—Notes on the Cinematographer by Robert Bresson, 1997. Green Integer.

Organizing space

Variation in shot size is at the heart of the camera strategy in the prologue of KAOS, a 1984 feature film by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. This variation functions to emphasize certain moments in the drama while also providing key story elements not included in the dialogue between characters. The prologue—a self-contained story told in four minutes—is a perfect length for exercising the muscle of close observation. We can easily determine which camera techniques have been used to create which dramatic effects. We can also discern the pattern of technique in the overall strategy that gives this short film credible coherence.

The first shots of the prologue are close-ups, revealing three men, each in turn, bearded, clothed in sheepskin, and fixed on the sight of what they discover to be a male bird sitting on a nest of warm eggs. Mockingly, they wrench the bird from the nest in the last close-up before an abrupt transition to an extreme wide shot that places the men in a vast landscape of boulder and scrub grass, bringing into view two other men who sit near a fire in front of a large umbrella (Shot 12, Figure 1.5).

The next set of shots (Figure 1.6) resume the use of medium close-ups and close-ups. They frame the sport of dangling the bird, as the men, one at a time, throw eggs—treating the bird as their mark. This succession of shots ends with the same extreme wide shot. This use of the wide shot emerges as a pattern in the film, a punctuation or narrative marker in what could be understood as a break between short acts.

The transition from close-up to extreme wide shot reveals the proximity between characters, as well as the characters in relation to the environment. The effect inverts the two examples from the Murnau film where shifts in proportion direct audience attention to a particular aspect of the previous, wider frame, not unlike a detail of a painting pictured in an art book. The wide shots in the KAOS prologue work as establishing shots, but the establishing takes place after characters are introduced and dramatic action has occurred. Having located the men in a rocky wilderness, the wide shot depicts proportion—suddenly characters that all but filled the frame in close-up are diminished by the comparative size and scale of their surroundings. The story’s thematic interest—the tug between artistic impulse and primitive instincts, dominance and freedom—is reinforced by the visual play between close-up and wide shot, even as the wide shot performs its explicit narrative function. The force of male dominance expressed by character behavior, costume, and tight framing converts the men to diminished status when seen against the backdrop of a massive boulder in the wide shot—nature shown having more sovereignty than their base instincts.

Figure 1.4

KAOS (1984). Directors: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. Cinematographer: Guiseppe Lanci.

The third act features the same range of close-ups and medium close-ups (Figure 1.6). The man seen earlier in the extreme wide shot near the fire intercepts the bird. Without the insertion of wide shots this character would appear to materialize from nowhere. Locating him, and allowing the viewer a sense of relative distances between characters, renders his action plausible. With bird in hand, he ties to its neck a bell. He lifts the bird into the air, “Go!” The bird takes flight. The men look up (a close-up). This is followed by a series of extreme wide shots that alternate between the bird against the sky and the aerial view of the dusty Sicilian landscape. Up to this point, the camera, while varied in its framing (close-ups interposed with extreme wide shots) and angles (several Dutch tilts), has been committed to the action occurring within a more or less static frame. With the bird’s flight, the camera breaks free to long fluid tracking shots that follow the direction and the height of the ascending bird. Alternating shots of bird in flight and bird’s eye view reflect a play between camera movement and the bird’s direction. The earlier pattern of punctuating each series of close-ups and medium close-ups with wide shots expands into aerial shots that deliver an ever-increasing distance between camera and ground, as a wider reach of it is seen (Figure 1.7).

Figure 1.5

KAOS (1984). Directors: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. Cinematogra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter one Camerawork
• Chapter two The static camera
• Chapter three The close-up
• Chapter four The moving camera
• Chapter five The wide shot and mise en scene
• Chapter six The long take
• Chapter seven Handheld camera and the legacy of documentary film
• Chapter eight Visual dynamics and tone
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Filmography
• Index
• eCopyright