9 Aug. 2010, Flagstaff, AZ
This is a continuation of my first two blogs on “Composition in Philip Bloom’s ‘2 nights in Mallory Square’” and “Blocking in Philip Bloom’s ‘2 nights in Mallory Square’”.
In this blog, I examine how Philip Bloom approaches camera movement in this short film. Here’s the film:
2 nights in Mallory Square from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.
The blocking of characters in a shot is essentially the movement in the composition of a scene. When the camera moves, it moves the composition — and this is one of the things that makes cinema different than painting. Camera movements can result in strong visual dynamics because it gives us the sense of moving through space, placing us kinetically in the scene.
But keep in mind that good camera movement — like the blocking of characters — needs to be motivated. If it’s random then it doesn’t do much for the scene.
The types of camera movement includes:
• Pan: left to right on the tripod axis
• Tilt: up and down on the tripod axis
• Push-in through space
• Pull-out through space
• Tracking (or dolly): lateral movement through space
• Crane: up and down movement through space.
In Philip Blooms “2 nights in Malory Square” we see a series of crane shots and dolly shots.
In this shot we see the camera start high across the crowd, then it moves down and right, placing us at sitting height capturing the man with the guitar.
The move gives us a sense of place in Key West, the wide angle lens capturing the atmosphere of the crowd at dusk, then we smoothly shift into what we are hearing — the man singing and playing the guitar.
A cut would have provided us the two images (the crowd and the guitar man), but the crane acts like a line of poetry, the connection made clear (without the jolt of a cut) through a smoothly executed move and evokes a different kind of feeling than if it were a cut. The movement is motivated by what we hear — the music — and the smoothness of the camera’s movement echoes the feel of the man’s song.
Kurt Lancaster, PhD, is the author of DSLR Cinema: Crafting the Film Look with Video, Focal Press. He teaches digital filmmaking at Northern Arizona University’s School of Communication.
