Good Advice Never Gets Old

From American Cinematographer, Camera Technique Dominates Filming Results by Claude W. Cadarette (January 1940)

Every movement of the camera must have a definite purpose behind it, and if it is done without a good reason you are just retarding the tempo of the picture.


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note from ryan: This is not something I learned today, but a truth that was retold from an article written over 70+ years ago! It's quite frustrating that such advice and wisdom has been around for so long, yet legions of new filmmakers and directors insist on camera moves with no motivation or justification. What Claude failed to mention, is unjustified camera moves not only slow the tempo of the picture, but the tempo of the production. Elaborate dolly shots can cause longer set-up and execution times.

John Toll: Akela Crane...Uhhh 'Dolly'?

From American Cinematographer, The War Within by Stephen Pizzello (February 1999)

"The Akela was a great asset. One of our biggest challenges was a daytime battle sequence in these grassy hills. The Japanese were in the hills, and the Americans had to go up there, find them, and kill them. To deal with those scenes, we brought in the Akela, which came with two American technicians. The terrain was very uneven; the grass was about waist-high, and underneath it there were a lot of rocks and holes. We spent weeks climbing up and falling down these hills. At times we could use the Steadicam really well out there, but at other times it became impossible because we wanted to see the soldiers actually going up the hills. One of the tougher challenges we faced was preserving the look of this waist-high grass. You couldn't walk through the grass more than a couple of times without leaving these huge paths. It was like working in snow, where you've got to cover your tracks. There's only so much you can do before you destroy the look of the location.

I was contemplating this problem long before we got to the location, because I knew what we were up against with the grass and the steep hills. I began thinking about using the Akela crane, which has an extremely long, 72' arm that would allow us to get the camera into places where we couldn't walk or lay dolly track. The only problem was that I wanted to install the crane on the sides of hills, which involved building some fairly substantial platforms, because the Akela weighs about 6,000 pounds. It worked out fabulously, though. The Akela's arm does have a slight arc, but it's a much more minimal arc than any conventional crane arm. Because of that, we could make shots that had the appearance of a dolly shot. That was the whole reason for bringing in the Akela, and we constantly had it at very low angles; I don't think we used it more than once or twice for a high-angled shot. Our expert technicians, Michael Gough and Mark Willard, kept wanting to show off how high it would go, but I kept hammering them with my mantra: 'It's a dolly, not a crane.' We basically turned our crane technicians into dolly grips, but they did a fantastic job.

There are some great Akela crane shots in the film where we follow the soldiers over really long distances. We did have to train the actors to stay with the crane arm, because it doesn't move in a perfectly straight line. If we were ahead of them, they could just follow the lens, but if we were shooting from behind, we would trace out the arc so the actors could follow it. But using the Akela really allowed us to get down in the grass and get shots that just wouldn't have been possible with a dolly or even a Steadicam because of the uneven terrain."

- John Toll, ASC

Hubert Taczanowski: Camera Lenses, Positioning, & Movement

From American Cinematographer, Rediscovering Eden by Holly Willis (March 1998)

"We never went wider than a 21mm, and the longest lens we used was the 70mm. I don't use zooms. Although there are fantastic zooms available from Arri and Panavision, I'd rather move the camera. I'm really in love with dollying and pushing in and out and adjusting. My philosophy is that when I'm looking at actors, I always put the camera on a dolly and I always make adjustments, even small ones-- 10" or 20"-- moving the camera left or right to get a better view. It's like when your watching something and someone blocks your view; you adjust by moving a little bit. That's how I approach moviemaking-- not necessarily in dramatic movements, like Scorsese does, but rather back and forth, to the left or right."

- Hubert Taczanowski

Frederick Elmes: Shooting in the Woods

From American Cinematographer, A Less-Than Civil War by Douglas Bankston (November 1999)

The tight confines of the woods, however, required a different technique.

"We'd try to find locations that had a pathway nearby, so we could build a dolly track and just push the camera along really fast for a short run. If you're clever, you can shoot one scene off one side of the dolly, and then turn the camera around and do the same dolly move while shooting in the opposite direction, because you have great woods on the other side as well."

-Frederick Elmes, ASC