It could be 8mm, 16, 35, video, cheap, expensive, digital... it's still the same -- CAMERA. If you are a composer, you know what I mean. You can pick and choose the instrument, but what you do is music. This is how you write your "music for the screen" -- with the camera.
What is it?
This is a poetic machine of seeing the world. Do you have such days, when you enjoy everything you see? This is the camera-mind...
To understand it, turn camera on and leve it. They do it for survelance. It has such a hunger for life, it records everything! Now imagine what it can do when there is a soul, with the same craving for living and action of being, behind the camera... You see!
Functions:
1. To follow action
2. To reveal action
3. To reveal landscape
4. To relate action
5. To induce action
Tertiary Motion is sequence motion.
Zooming & Dollying
New page for Film & Video Directing (Spring 2000). Camera is your tool! Everything is for the camera: script, acting, directing, lights, sounds! You mix it all together in the camera -- for the final mixture of your edited film!
We use only video cameras in class. Get yourself familiar with them. Very few you can get from the library and you have to reserve them. Better to have your own one!
Most of the editing is done by two-VCR "technique" -- ask Kyle, TA. He will do the final editing of the entire Web-Show "Twelfth Night" (see text). "First come, first serve" -- you select your scene! 10 min or so (short, long).
Turn it into a shooting script and do storyboarding right away!
If you do not know much about dramatic structure, you are in trouble -- go theatre pages. Text must be analyzed and understood before we can talk "shots" and "shooting"! Camera demands a lot of homework.
See Cinema page (film analysis) for more on filming and working in Virtual Theatre Format. Here cameraman becomes a reporter-creator. Is he a director? Every night he is telling a different story, he is a narrator. Read about philosophy of POV to understand the challenges of the new electronic medium. Camera is more than just a tool. Learn the Language of Angels!
NOTE: All Film and Theatre pages will have more and more comments on Virtual Theatre Aesthetics and Techniques; consider it as a research component of those educational pages.
PS
Most of my film students have no stage directing experience and therefore do not know how to work with actors. Worse, the the storyboarding without rehearsing with actors. Even more, mots of the actors they use have at best limited actting experience. You have to rehearse with actor in order to organize the camera-work! First is the text and actors, you have to follow the action built in script, then you go for making the primary motion into secondary motion (camera movement). The cuts are the most powerful motion (the 3rd level -- montage. In rder for you to make it work, you have to control all THREE levels of motion!
You cannot treat them separately!
Read Method Acting for Directors (Stanislavsky picture on the right)!
Questions in class
What is the "screen event"?
What is the depth of event?
What is the "mass" of event?
Five new pages on Film Acting: Screen (331 Directing), Actors (Filmmaking 101), Video (biomechanics.vtheatre.net), Film (BM for Camera), Camera (Method Acting) * (2004) *
"As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree' -- probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on." - Woody Allen
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