Misa y Oficio solemnes en las fiestas de primera clase

Just as there are names for different framings (for example, MS, CU, ECU, and others described in Chapter 3), there are names for different camera movements. Many of the names come from the equipment traditionally used to execute a specific type of movement, such as a truck or a dolly. With the advent of stabilization devices like the Steadicam, trucking shots and dolly shots can now be made without an actual truck or a dolly, but the names still hold.

A trucking shot simulates the movement of a camera mounted on a truck, and moves the camera parallel to the action. Trucking shots don't necessarily move the camera closer to or farther away from a subject. A director might ask a Steadicam operator to truck from left to right across a room.

A dolly shot moves a camera closer to or farther away from the subject. As you can guess from the name, it simulates the movement of a camera mounted on a dolly. To "dolly in," is to move toward something, to "dolly out," is to move away. (See "Using a Camera Dolly" later in this chapter.)

Dolly and truck shots can also be used in combination with pans and tilts. A pan moves the lens of a camera from side to side; a tilt moves the lens up or down.

If you're not satisfied with leaning a stabilized camcorder outside a car window to get a shot, Glidecam offers a vehicle mount you can use to affix your Glidecam V-8 to the outside of a truck or another moving vehicle—it attaches the Glidecam to a fixed, vehicle-mounted post instead of a harness worn by a cinematographer. This is an affordable way to get an actual trucking shot.

If you want to simply attach a camera to the outside of a car, you can buy something called a "Sticky Pod"

for slightly more than $100, which affixes a camera to the outside of a vehicle using suction cups (yes, suction cups—I don't know anyone who's used one so I'm not endorsing it, I'm just fascinated by the idea).

The Sticky Pod mounts a camera on a post (Figure 6-4), which is attached to a small platform with suction cups at the corners. The company advertises that its product "will stick to any car, truck, boat, plane, or motorcycle," and stay put at speeds of more than 110 miles per hour. If you're worried about losing an expensive camera at high speeds, which is not an unreasonable fear, you can mount a camera inside a car facing your actors or the road. (You could also try using an older or cheaper camera and accepting the risk

—you might get some great tape, if it doesn't cost you your camera.)

The POV Shot

The term POV means a shot taken from the point of view of a character in a film. Rather than simply displaying a character on a screen, a filmmaker can use POV shots to draw the audience further into the action. By showing the world through the eyes of someone in the film, a POV shot can add layers of complexity, detail, and power to a sequence. (Spike Jonze uses a great POV shot at the end of Being John Malkovich.)

A Steadicam is especially helpful for creating POV shots because it provides a camera operator with tremendous flexibility and control. A good Steadicam operator can reproduce a full range of actors' movements (including walking into a room, climbing stairs, and even chasing or running away from someone) that can help audiences feel like they're part of the story.

Figure 6-4. With the aid of suction cups, a Sticky Pod attaches a camera to a vehicle.

Mounting a camera inside or outside a car enables you to take point-of-view shots of the vehicle moving through traffic, or of the driver and passengers through the car's windows. Shooting from outside through the windshield of a moving car enables you to capture great reflections that add to the realism of a shot. Of course, you also have the option of filming a stationary car and compositing in reflections or dramatic chroma key backgrounds (see Chapters 5 and 12). Directors often combine Steadicam footage with chroma key effects to create driving sequences; this provides more control to the filmmaker and helps safeguard against high-speed crashes. The effects don't have to look fake, especially if you're careful about lighting and other considerations mentioned in Chapter 5. Much of The Fast and the Furious was shot using composite techniques to avoid placing the cast and crew in overly dangerous situations, and it still looks really cool.

Both Steadicam and Glidecam offer "low mount" attachments, to help you shoot stable footage at low angles. These can be especially helpful for shooting ground-level shots, for example, filming small animals at their eye level, or shooting low-angle shots of your actors—shots of footsteps moving toward or away from the camera are staples in suspense films. If your shoot calls for stationary low shots you can also use a short tripod, often referred to as a set of "baby legs." Baby legs offer the same benefit as a tripod, but they're much shorter, so they enable you to stabilize a camera only a few inches off the ground, as in Figure 6-5. (They also cost considerably less than a Steadicam or Glidecam.) If you don't have baby legs available, you can stabilize a camera by nestling it in some sandbags, or even, in a pinch, wedging it between some coats or jackets. In the days before affordable Steadicam-type stabilizers, I made a student film that opened with a shot from a car driving down a palm tree–lined road. A classmate filmed the shot by leaning out

through the car's sunroof holding a 16 mm film camera against a sandbag. Very low tech, and rather uncomfortable for my classmate, but the shot turned out great.

Figure 6-5. "Baby legs," essentially a short tripod.

Glidecam also sells a portable camera crane, the Camcrane 200 (Figure 6-6), that mounts on a tripod and allows you to raise and lower your camera while moving it in 360-degree arcs. It retails for less than $550.

Camera cranes extend the range of your cinematographer by placing a camera at the end of an adjustable boom. This enables filmmakers to move a camera into parts of a scene where a camera operator might get in the way, or to simply film from an angle beyond a cinematographer's physical reach. A company called Porta-Jib (www.porta-jib.com) makes a more sophisticated (and more expensive) jib arm-type crane that enables cinematographers to extend and retract the crane's arm during a shot, dramatically expanding the possible options. The Porta-Jib is priced at the higher end of prosumer products (it lists for more than

$2,000) but might be worth exploring if you feel it would really help your film.

Figure 6-6. The Camcrane 200.

Both the Camcrane and Porta-Jib can be used in stationary locations or on camera dollies that

accommodate a tripod. Losmandy, the same company that makes the Porta-Jib, also sells a Spider Dolly (Figure 6-7), which is essentially a base that accommodates a tripod for tracking shots. Losmandy sells both three- and four-wheeled versions of the Spider Dolly. Either can be used on a track or with floor wheels (similar to the wheels on a supermarket shopping cart but designed to move much more smoothly).

As you may have guessed, the company also sells track. Their FlexTrack comes in 40-foot spools that filmmakers can position in straight or curved paths. According to the company, a looped 40-foot section of track provides a 17-foot run. You can also place two 40-foot pieces end to end for really long tracking shots. A three-leg Spider Dolly lists for about $1,000 (the dolly with floor wheels costs slightly more than the track version). The four-wheel dolly lists for more than $3,000 and comes with a rideable platform and swiveling seat, so your camera operator can ride along with the camera and turn as needed.

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Finding an Equipment Rental House in Your Area

Not all equipment rental facilities are worth your business. Some may rent out older or even damaged equipment, some may not want to work with an independent on a small budget. Ask around before you rent, and don't waste your time or money on a business if someone you know had a bad experience with them.

Here are some tips to aid you in finding a rental house:

 Join a professional association of filmmakers. Some rent equipment to members at discounted prices, and most help you get discounts on rentals, tape stock, and professional services from other businesses in your area. The Film Arts Foundation (www.filmarts.org) and Bay Area Video Coalition (www.bavc.org) in San Francisco, Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers (www.aivf.org) in New York, and International Documentary Association in Los Angeles (www.documentary.org) are all large organizations open to membership from people around the world.

 Contact a local arts organization and ask if they have any recommendations. There are local organizations from the biggest cities to small towns across the country. Chances are somebody at the local office will have some good suggestions, or at least be able to point you in the right direction.

 Ask your friends. The people you know are always your greatest resource. If you have friends who've rented equipment, ask who they rented from and what their experience was like—it's the best way to get a straight answer.

Figure 6-7. A Losmandy Spider Dolly and track.

Just about any piece of filmmaking equipment can be rented by the day or the week (see "Finding an Equipment Rental House in Your Area"). Even if you live in a fairly small city, there's more than likely a rental house nearby (if you live in commuting distance of New York or Los Angeles you may have more rental options than you know what to do with). Depending on your circumstances, renting equipment can be far more cost effective than purchasing. For example, if you only need to use a $3,000 dolly for one day, it doesn't make too much sense to buy it. Even if you know you'll be using an item often enough to justify a purchase, you might still want to rent one and use it in the field before you commit to a particular model or brand.

6.2. Using a Camera Dolly

The arrival of the Steadicam on movie sets has by no means made the camera dolly obsolete. Some of independent film's most creative directors continue to use dolly shots to achieve specific effects.

There's a key scene in Spike Lee's 25th Hour, when a 17-year-old high school student played by Anna Paquin glides dreamily through a nightclub on her way to seducing her awkwardly bookish English teacher, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Paquin is standing on the same dolly as the camera, which frames her from the chest up, so she maintains a fixed distance from the camera as the furniture and the people in the club move around her. She seems to float. As she moves, the ambient light on her face changes with her surroundings, highlighting the surreal motion—if she were walking, the camera wouldn't remain at her perfect eye level through the entire shot, and the distance between her and the camera would change slightly as she took each step. Lee is a big fan of this kind of shot (he includes one in just about all of his films) and uses the actor-on-dolly technique again as the scene winds down. The next time, Hoffman stands on the dolly staring up at the camera, looking seasick and bemused as the camera moves with him away from the bathroom where he has just clumsily kissed his student. As he glides through space with the camera, Hoffman stands still, holding the same facial expression and not moving his body at all. The shot produces a similarly surreal effect as Paquin's earlier dolly appearance but with much darker emotional overtones.

Martin Scorsese uses similar dolly techniques in his films, careening through a bar with a drunken Robert DeNiro in Mean Streets, and using a point-of-view dolly shot in Goodfellas to introduce the audience to the extended family of mobsters as Ray Liotta narrates. Lee and Scorsese use these techniques to draw the audience in and make people feel like they're part of the action they're watching onscreen. In Goodfellas, the mobsters all look slightly off camera as they say hello to Liotta's character, Henry Hill. The audience sees the action, and viewers feel as if they were walking through the bar along side Liotta, living the story firsthand.

Using shots like these doesn't in itself make you the next Spike Lee or Martin Scorsese (their work also contains a fair amount of cinematic genius, not to mention tight writing, and stellar actors), but thinking about camera work is a great way to define the visual feel of your film.

Lee and Scorsese are also both masters of using audio to tell a story. Their films make exceptional use of sound as a tool to move a story forward and engage an audience. You can do the same thing. The next chapter of this book explores the history of audio recording in film and video and introduces various audio production concepts available to you as a filmmaker. Chapter 8 examines ways you can use audio

equipment to make sure your film sounds as good as you want it to.

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