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CHAPTER 3 | CAMERA BLOCKING

Why Move Your Camera?

The results are in. It's now final. Sidney Lumet has started to move his camera. Therefore, the revolution which Spielberg started in the early ‘70s is complete. Before Spielberg, a director had a choice. Whenever possible, he could move his camera and use lenses to force perspective, like Orson Welles, or he could do it occasionally, like Capra, or rarely, if at all, like Lumet.

By the mid-'70s Spielberg's phenomenal success had all but wiped out the choice. Spielberg had set the visual standard for the business. Every director was hip to the trend — the more your movies looked like Spielberg's, the more work you were going to get. For those of us who started careers in Spielberg's wake, the pressure to ape the master was intense. As time went on, the pressure became even more intense. In the early ‘80s along came MTV which pushed camera movement and forced perspective to its logical conclusion and beyond by ushering in the hyperactive, shaky camera of Joe Pytka. In Pytka's breakthrough commercials the camera jumped, jittered, zoomed in and out, and hunted around as if it had a mind of its own. That brought about the Snoopy Camera of NYPD Blue and Homicide, which not only had a mind of its own, but seemed high on speed or something so energizing, it never stopped moving. And yet, through it all, the great Sidney Lumet held firm. Static wide shot, over the shoulder's, close-up, close-up, extreme close- up if necessary; that's how he shot his films. And they were fantastic. Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City, and The Verdict succeeded so completely on every other level, they did not have to look like Spielberg's.

Through the ‘80s and ‘90s, the toys for moving the camera got better and better. The steadicam, the sky cam, the luma crane, the shot maker enabled Spielberg and all those who were shooting in his style to make the camera perform like Tinker Bell. Directors who had always moved their camera, moved it more wildly and more often. Why not? With the new technology, they could add still greater intensity to the visual aspect of their films. Scorsese moved his camera so much in The Color of Money a friend of mine quipped, “The cameraman should have gotten paid by the yard.” And yet, Lumet would not budge. Static wide shot, over the shoulder's, close-up, close-up.

Hereafter, for the sake of convenience, I am going to refer to the style in which all major studio movies are shot today — with a consistently moving camera and regular use of forced perspective lenses — as the Spielbergian style. This is not to say that he invented this style. Hitchcock and especially Welles pioneered it. Kubrick and a handful of others used it to good end in the two decades before Spielberg burst on the scene. But the success of Spielberg's films established this style as the industry standard.

Those of us who shot in the Spielbergian style would declare: “You have to move your camera whenever possible to be taken seriously as a director!” And every time, we would have it thrown back in our face that the great Lumet never moved his camera. Of course, there were other notable holdouts: Rob Reiner and (generally speaking) Woody Allen. But none as notable or as longstanding as Lumet.

And now the mighty Lumet has fallen. So, without further discussion, let me state that to make it as a director in today's film business, whenever possible, you must move your camera, and force your perspective (a technique to be addressed in Chapter 5). You can elect not to, but it will cost you. You will seem old-fashioned and un-hip, and more importantly, your films will lack the visual intensity of those who shoot in that style. Since building a career as a director is next to impossible, it's simply self-destructive and dangerous to not shoot in what has come to be the universally accepted style of the moment. You may feel that you are to contemporary film what Van Gogh was to late 19th-century painting. To that I say, you better be ready to throw your life away for your art, as Van Gogh did, and you best be sure your talent is as monumental as his was.

When Do You Move Your Camera?

When I advise moving the camera whenever possible, I do not simply mean whenever there is space to do so — whenever it is physically possible. What I am addressing is the question of when your film is best served by a moving camera — when it is most appropriate. Believe it or not, many good directors have not quite figured exactly when this moment occurs. After I had worked for 20 years in the business, I still did not have a hard and fast rule which I could apply to help me to determine exactly what factors constituted an opportunity to move my camera. Then Bob Zemeckis visited one of my directing classes and laid it out for my students and me.

The principle behind what I call Bob's Rule is that the story is the most important component of a film, and so everything else in the film — be it acting, art direction, music, lighting, sound, editing, or camera movement — should serve the story. You should move the camera whenever possible to add visual energy to the film, but only in a manner which enhances the story or at least does not detract from it. Stated simply, all good camera movement is invisible.

Even those directors with the most energetic camera styles — the guys who ought to pay their cameraman by the yard — would be hard pressed to refute the underlying truth of this principle. Very few people would pay $10 or more to sit in a theater for two hours and watch all the cool camera moves in GoodFellas, Natural Born Killers, Pearl Harbor, or Face Off cut together in a non-narrative fashion. As mentioned earlier, they go to be transported in space and time into the lives of the major characters of those films.

If at some point in mid-film, the line of the story becomes unclear or stops and the audience finds itself watching a cool camera move — no matter how cool that camera move — the audience's overall enjoyment of the film will suffer because the spell has been broken. For that moment, they are not a Mafia don or a Jedi warrior or even a junkie trying to stay clean, like the hero of Trainspotting. They are just themselves with bills to pay, a car that's double-parked, and a date who might be acting like a jerk. So a good objective for any first time director would be to move his camera as much as possible to look as hip and MTV-wise as he can, right up to the point where the audience would actually take notice and say, “Look at that cool camera move.” In other words, this is why camera movement is essential, but should always be invisible. When it becomes visible or noticeable, camera movement detracts from the story.

Unfortunately, some good working directors go too far in their effort to satisfy today's audiences' taste. They get so caught up in their desire to energize and MTVize the visual aspect of their films, they start moving their camera in an arbitrary way, irrespective of story. Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma, Oliver Stone, Sam Raimi, Michael Bay, John Woo, and a handful of others fall into this group. Because, on the whole, these directors do splendid work, and because they tend to be more cutting-edge than other established directors, many young or first time directors are tempted to copy them. Do so with caution. These directors make good films but their films suffer whenever they overlook the central truth of Bob's Rule. Even the members of Generation X demand a great story to lose themselves in. Pulp Fiction, Clerks, Reality Bites, Trainspotting, Dark City, Go!, although cutting-edge, have great stories. Scorsese, Stone, and DePalma may not realize it, but as much as the public likes their films, it would like them more if they could just avoid the temptation of occasionally losing the audience at the expense of making a cool camera move.

Externally and Internally Generated Camera Moves

For camera movement to be invisible, it has to be externally or internally generated by whatever is on the screen — preferably the person or thing which, at that point in the film, is driving the story. An externally generated camera move is simply a tracking or panning shot. Something in the frame moves; the camera tracks or pans with it to keep it in frame. The externally generated moves are by far the most common. Everything, from shots of jet aircraft filmed from other air- craft — air to air shots — like those in Top Gun, which can go on for hundreds of miles, down to a simple panning or tracking shot which follows a character as he gets up from his desk and crosses to the window, can be lumped together in this group. It's easy to understand why these moves never call attention to themselves and never detract from the story. The camera is moving quite literally to keep up with the story. If the camera did not move, the person or thing which is driving the story would slip offscreen.

Probably 95% of all camera moves in theatrical features are externally generated. And since, in the post-Spielbergian era, moving the camera has become de rigueur, externally generated camera moves probably make up more than half of all shots used in feature films. At first glance, that may seem like a high percentage. Why is it that whatever is driving the story always seems to be about to move off camera, making it necessary for the camera to move in order to keep that something framed up on screen? The answer to this contains one of the keys to successful camera blocking.

The camera has to keep moving to keep up with whatever is on screen, because, ever since Spielberg started doing it all the time, directors now almost always start a scene with the camera framed up tighter on the principal object in the scene than was the custom in the pre-Spielbergian days. After framing it up tight, they then have that principal object take off moving. Since the camera is virtually on top of the principal object, it has to make a countermove to keep that object in frame.

If the principal object is the huge boulder which has been booby-trapped to catch up with and crush Indiana Jones after he lifts the idol off of its pedestal in the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark, then Spielberg puts the camera fairly close to boulder, and when the boulder takes off, the camera has to back up fast to keep the boulder in frame. (The camera does not move as fast as the boulder; the boulder gains steadily on the camera. Herein lies much of the excitement in the scene, for this shot is Indiana's point of view, and as the boulder looms larger in the frame, it seems as if it is going to run over him.) Meanwhile, Indiana has taken off running as fast as he can to get away from the boulder. Spielberg has him framed up in a medium close shot before he starts running, so when he takes off, the camera has to take off with him, otherwise the shot will fall apart because he will be too far away from camera and disproportionately small in the frame. By placing the camera close to the principal object and then moving that object, Spielberg has given his camera an externally generated, story-based reason to move. It satisfies Bob's Rule that the camera should move whenever possible, but the move should serve the story and so become invisible.

In the pre-Spielbergian era, directors used a wide master shot to capture the movement of the principal object in the scene. They backed the camera way off, and framed it up wide enough so that the shot would contain, to use the above example from Raiders, the entire beginning, middle, and end of the boulder's journey. This way they did not have to move the camera in order to film the whole length of the boulder's course. It could be done in one static wide shot. They would also do tighter shots of the boulder when it started and finished rolling. Then they cut three static shots together to cover the boulder's movement. By keeping the camera at a distance from the moving objects, they eliminated the need for a moving camera.

Conversely, the key to moving your camera in the post-Spielbergian era is to begin a scene framed fairly tight on the central object in the scene, have that object take off moving, and force the camera to counter in different directions in a series of externally generated moves. The camera could be pushed back like the boulder, pulled along like Indiana, or in the same way, pushed screen left or screen right, up or down, and all possible combinations of the above. The central object pushing the camera could be as big as the boulder or as small as the feather that floats through the credits of Forrest Gump. This strategy is the one which all directors who move their camera according to Bob's Rules use to block not only action scenes, like the scene from Raiders, but also dialogue scenes between actors. In a dialogue scene, the actors walk and talk at various times in the scene, forcing the camera to counter in various directions to keep them properly framed.