Impulse

I’ve finally got­ten back into edit­ing the RAAM video in earnest. While doing so, I came across some clips that illus­trate some of the points from my series on video vs stills.

The first is an exam­ple of me being too wor­ried about unmo­ti­vated cam­era move­ment. Because I didn’t want to move much for fear of dis­tract­ing the viewer (or loos­ing pos­si­ble actions that may come up), I didn’t creep around as the peo­ple shifted. Gradually the rider moves behind the inspec­tor. It’s a really bor­ing shot. Notice how much more inter­est­ing it feels when they step apart and acci­den­tally give me an inter­est­ing com­po­si­tion. (Actually, the other rea­son I didn’t fol­low the peo­ple is because the tail­gate of a mini­van was inches from my head — if you watch care­fully, you can see me clock myself with it).

Watch this one before I explain it:

This is another exam­ple of me being too chicken to move around a bit. We stare at the inspec­tors back for a long time — quite bor­ing. But, this cameraman’s rigid­ity, though, lets us see another pecu­liar­ity that I call Alien Characters — peo­ple who you didn’t know existed until they start talk­ing from off cam­era or sud­denly appear from nowhere. It’s a bit unset­tling; hence the need for an estab­lish­ing shot ahead of time to show where you are and who’s there. Unfortunately, doing doc­u­men­tary work, you don’t always get a chance to do an estab­lish­ing shot. Even if you do peo­ple often are mov­ing around you — as in this case when two peo­ple crept up behind me who weren’t there when I started the cam­era.
(and don’t you just love that micro­phone boom…)

Related posts:

1. RAAM: edit­ing the hard­est race in the world
2. RAAM: movie edit­ing continues
3. Video vs still pho­tog­ra­phy, pt 4
4. First day of shooting!
5. When in doubt, shoot B-roll