Directing the Camera

by Gil Bettman

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  Motion Across the Lens — The Y-Axis

  Everything said above about motion on the X-axis across the frame is equally true for motion on the Y-axis from the bottom of the frame to the top of the frame.

  So, stated simply, if an object is flying from the bottom of the frame to the top of the frame (or the top to the bottom) along the Y-axis you can accelerate the motion of the object if you shoot it with a wide-angle lens, provided the object comes as close as possible to the lens. So in Figures 5.034 to 5.037 as Spider-Man flies up the face of a skyscraper the camera tightens up on him and sweeps closer to the face of the building. The properties of the lens make Spider-Man and the building get bigger faster.

  And you can also accelerate the motion along the Y-axis if you shoot it with a telephoto lens and pan or dolly with the object as it flies from the bottom of the frame to the top (Figure 5.038 to 5.042) or from the top to the bottom.

  A GOOD WAY TO LEARN HOW LENSES AFFECT MOTION

  If these seemingly contradictory properties of the extreme lenses have got you a little dazed and confused, a surefire remedy is at hand. Pick up that mini DV camera and go out and replicate the examples of the cows and the hawk. The easiest way to do this is to shoot a friend of yours riding a bicycle toward the camera down the sidewalk next to a row of cars parked at the curb. The parked cars will stand in for the cows and the bike for the hawk.

  First, set up a shot that should replicate how the wide-angle lens can seem to accelerate motion on the Z-axis coming to or away from the lens. Have your friend ride toward you once and shoot him with the zoom lens at the widest setting. Make sure that he rides the bike right up to where you are with the camera and comes as close as possible to hitting the lens without actually doing so. This is necessary because the property of the wide-angle lens that enables it to make motion in the frame seem more rapid increases the closer the moving object gets to the lens. If you do it right, the bike should go from looking very tiny in the lens to very large as it passes by the lens. In this way it would represent the rapid movement of the hawk from background to foreground, when seen through a wide-angle lens.

  Next, set up a shot that should show you how a wide-angle lens seems to accelerate motion on the X-axis when it crosses in front of the camera. Move the camera more out into the street, or up onto the sidewalk, so the bike can pass between the camera and the row of parked cars. This time have your friend on the bike start in the same place, ride up to where you are with the camera, and pass you. As he passes you, pan with him and shoot him riding off down the street, continuing past the row of parked cars. This should represent the way the wide-angle lens can seem to speed up motion on the X-axis across the lens. Your friend on the bike should go from looking very tiny when he starts, to very large as he passes you, to very small again as he rides off in the distance. In this way the bike will stand in for the truck in Figures 5.004 to 5.007.

  Next, zoom the lens in to its most telephoto setting. If your camera has a teleconverter or doubler feature to make the lens setting twice as telephoto, then engage the doubler feature. Have your friend sit on the bike exactly where he passed by the camera when you shot him using the wide-angle setting. Walk away from him down the sidewalk until when you look through the camera back at him seated on the bike he fills the frame from top to bottom. Put the camera on a tripod to steady it. Have your friend on the bike note where he is on the sidewalk and tell him that is his end mark — where the shot ends. Then have him back up to where he started in both of the shots described above and ride the bike down the sidewalk toward you until he hits his end mark. (Because of the narrow depth of field of a telephoto lens, your friend may be out of focus at the beginning or the end of his ride.) This should approximate the way the extreme telephoto lens seems to slow the movement of an object coming to or away from the camera on the Z-axis.

  Finally, with the camera on the tripod and still zoomed into the most telephoto setting, try to frame up a shot of your friend on the bike riding on the X-axis across, or perpendicular to the lens. Because of the telescopic properties of the lens you are going to have to be a good distance away from your friend on the bike. So the section of sidewalk he is riding on must run adjacent to a large open space in a park or an empty lot, and you have to be at the back of that open space, perpendicular to the sidewalk. Because he is traveling on the bike on the X-axis perpendicular to, or across, the lens, and because you are zoomed in as tight as possible on him, the vertical lines in the cars he rides past should appear on one side of the frame and disappear out the opposite side, generating motion blur and eye candy. In this way, the bike would stand in for the hawk flying in front of the cows or trees and reveal how the telephoto lens seems to accelerate motion on the X-axis across the lens.

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  A picture is worth a thousand words, and once you have something of yourself invested in those pictures, the way they have been altered by the extreme lenses will start to have meaning for you. In the end you should have a very effective tool for remembering how the properties of wide-angle and telephoto lenses affect movement in the frame. Yes, film is indeed movement. By altering the way movement appears in the frame, lenses offer a director yet another way to shape the medium of film to meet his artistic ends. So start now and learn your lenses if you want to become a filmmaker in the fullest sense.

  CHAPTER 5 SUMMARY POINTS

  ● The best rule of thumb on the set of your first feature is to force perspective whenever possible, so your films come up to the visual standard of today. But make sure that such cinematographic enhancements always serve the story, and so remain invisible.

  ● Leave the lens selection up to the DP on all shots except those that call out for a forced perspective or some other very specific look. Have the DP take ownership of the film.

  ● Lens selection is easy because you only have to fully understand two things: (1) how the look of an extreme telephoto lens differs from the look of a normal, or 50mm, lens and (2) how the look of an extreme wide-angle lens differs from the look of a normal or 50mm lens.

  ● Unless some unusual aspect of the story demands it, the longest lens you would ever have occasion to use is a 300mm, and the widest lens is a 10mm. A 300mm gives you an ultra-telephoto look. The 10 gives you an extreme wide-angle look. The 300 and the 10 are the two extremes. Every other lens does what they do, except less so. If you fully understand what the extremes do, you can easily extrapolate what all the other lenses do.

  ● Extreme telephoto lenses make both middleground and background objects look larger than they do to the naked eye. This seems to compress distances in the frame. The middleground and the background both seem to be squashed together and forced into the foreground. The long lens also narrows the field of vision so the camera sees less from one side of the frame to the other. The focal plane is shallow, so only one part of the frame — background, middleground, or foreground — is in sharp focus. Therefore, extreme telephoto lenses “see less.”

  ● When seen through an extreme wide-angle lens, foreground objects look bigger than they do to the naked eye and background objects look smaller. This seems to expand distances in the frame. In addition, the field of vision is widened so the camera sees more from one side of the frame to the other. The depth of field is increased so generally everything in the frame is in focus. This is how wide-angle lenses “see more.”

  ● To get a wide-angle forced perspective look or a telephoto forced perspective look, the camera has to be moved in relation to the objects in the frame: closer for the wide-angle look and farther away for the telephoto look.

  ● The expanded, rounded perspective of the wide lenses lends itself to that which is geographical a
nd architectural. Vistas look more expansive. Buildings and interior spaces seem more spacious and habitable.

  ● Telephoto lenses diminish depth and therefore bulk. Because of this effect, these lenses lend themselves to close-ups and tight shots of the human face and body.

  ● Film is movement. By altering the way movement appears in the frame, lenses offer a director yet another way to shape the medium of film to meet his artistic ends.

  ● If there is movement in a shot, then in order to select the right lens for that shot, you have to give the greatest weight to how that lens will affect the look of the movement.

  ● Wide-angle lenses accelerate motion on the Z-axis coming to the lens or away from the lens provided that motion passes close to the lens. Because of the way the wide lens forces perspective, anything in motion will seem to get much bigger (or much smaller) as it passes by the lens, and therefore seem to be moving faster.

  ● Telephoto lenses slow down motion on the Z-axis coming to the lens or away from the lens. Because of the way the telephoto lens forces perspective, anything in motion will hardly change in size as it approaches (or moves away from) the lens and therefore hardly seem to be moving.

  ● Wide-angle lenses accelerate motion on the X-axis across (or perpendicular to) the lens provided that motion passes close to the lens. In the same way that it speeds up motion on the Z-axis, the forced perspective of the lens will make an object in motion get bigger faster as it approaches the lens and smaller faster as it travels away from the lens.

  ● Telephoto lenses seem to accelerate the motion of an object on the X-axis across the lens because of the way the narrow field of vision and shallow depth of field of the lens turn everything else in the frame except for the moving object into eye candy. The bigger the brighter the objects passing through the frame, the faster they appear and disappear, the more motion blur, the more eye candy, the more speed.

  ● As soon as you have finished reading this chapter, you must go out and play around with telephoto and wide lenses and a camera. This is the only way to guarantee that you remember the principles of lens selection long enough to use them when you get your breakthrough directing shot.

  FOR TEACHERS

  In the last section of this chapter under “a good way to learn how lenses affect motion” I describe how a student can best solidify his understanding of this element of craft by using a simple point-and-shoot camera with a zoom lens to shoot a friend riding down the sidewalk on a bicycle. I suggest setting up and shooting four different shots.

  These four shots can be given in class as an assignment. It would help if the students formed teams of two so that one can set up and operate the camera while the other one rides the bike and then they can reverse roles. If they all use the same piece of sidewalk as a location, this will not diminish the extent of their learning. The teacher can facilitate the learning process by finding a section of sidewalk near where the class meets that can serve as a common location for all of the separate projects. If the students all shoot in the same location it will be easier for them to compare their results with those of their classmates and deduce which techniques produced the best results. Without a doubt, the best way to learn how to use lenses is to use them and then study the results. This exercise will give the students a well-structured way to do that.

  CHAPTER 6

  BREAKING DOWN YOUR ACTION SEQUENCE

  THE THEORY BEHIND STORYBOARDING AND PRE-VISUALIZATION

  As I stated in Chapter 4, when you are directing an action sequence it is absolutely crucial that you and the stunt coordinator go to the location, prior to the shoot day, and work out how the stunts are going to be choreographed and where you are going to put the cameras. Otherwise, on the shoot day, the cast and crew stand around getting paid a lot of money to do nothing, while you and the stunt coordinator work through what you could have done on your own, ahead of time. Some stunt coordinators will demand that they be paid for such a prep day. This is money well spent.

  Again, to make sure the stunts sell you have to:

  1. Put the camera in the right place.

  2. Put the right lens on the camera.

  3. Get the right number of pieces (of coverage).

  And until you are a big-name director and have an unlimited budget, the key to shooting a great action sequence is #3 — determining the crucial pieces. You will not have the time to shoot everything you might need. To make it great, you have to shoot just the very best pieces — the ones that make the action look the most dynamic — and keep moving. Otherwise you will not complete the day’s work.

  This process of key shot selection is known as breaking down the action sequence. Once you have determined these crucial shots, you should memorialize your decisions by storyboarding the sequence. This entails sitting with an artist who does a rough drawing of what each one of these crucial camera setups will look like. To draw good storyboards the artist does not have to be a professional storyboard artist with a list of credits a mile long. He simply has to know how different lenses change the look of a shot, and understand the basics of how a sequence is shot from different camera angles, which are then edited together.

  The good news is artists who have these skills are plentiful in most major film centers, such as Los Angeles or New York. These guys will gladly draw a hundred storyboards for $200 or a little more, because they are working as animators at places like Disney or DreamWorks, and they are bored out of their skulls. The best ones aspire to direct in animation or live action. If they draw your storyboards for you, they are getting paid to learn how to think like a director, so, in my experience, they are often willing to do quality work for bottom dollar. And the good ones love film and filmmaking. As artists, they are completely gonzo over how forced perspective can be used to make action seem more dynamic. They are aficionados of comics and graphic novels, so they usually need no coaching about how to draw your camera setups so the action in the frame comes to life. The very best ones understand filmmaking so thoroughly they can give you ideas for camera setups that might be better than ones you and the stunt coordinator have settled upon.

  This was my experience with Doug Lefler, who drew the storyboards for the first music video I directed, Chicago’s “Stay the Night.” When he walked into the one-room, bullpen office of Limelight, the production company that made the video, he had never been paid to work as a storyboard artist. He thought he would have to audition for the job, so he brought a pad of blank storyboard cells. I spotted the pad, and walked up and asked him if he was the storyboard artist. When he said, “Yes,” I said, “Let’s get to work.” And so we did.

  Soon after that, Doug started drawing storyboards for Sam Raimi. He did most of Raimi’s boards for the Darkman films, as well as Army of Darkness. On Army of Darkness, Raimi let him direct some second units. When Raimi started making the Hercules TV series in New Zealand, Doug became a second unit director on Hercules. He then directed the Xena pilot and a number of other TV shows, before being tapped by Harvey Weinstein and Dino Di Laurentis to direct a sixty million dollar, sword-and-sandal action film called The Last Legion. To say that Doug occasionally gave me a good idea about how to improve the action sequences he storyboarded for me would be a drastic understatement. I offer my experience with him as an example of how it is wise for a director to be open to creative suggestions from his storyboard artist.

  As the digital age progresses, the tools for generating storyboards digitally are becoming more effective and easy to use. A director with good digital chops can generate his own rough boards using Frame Forge. The big-budget action films now even go one step beyond storyboarding and, before the start of production, prepare digital versions of their action sequences using graphic animation. This is known as pre-visualization.

  Whatever the means used, it is crucial to produce a permanent visual version of everything the director and the stunt coordinator have agreed upon. Before the first stunt can be shot, these decisions must be communicated to ev
ery stuntman and every crew member. It would take many hours for the director and the stunt coordinator to do this verbally. But a picture is worth a thousand words, so if the sequence has been storyboarded all you have to do is distribute the storyboards, have a meeting to talk through them, and you are, for the most part, good to go. From the first shot on you can work as quickly as is humanly possible.

  Even though, in the long run, this is a huge cost-saver, sometimes on a low-budget film the bean counters will not pay to have the stunts storyboarded. This is totally inane, and a classic example of stepping over dollars to pick up dimes. It is in your best interest to fight this decision as vigorously as you reasonably can without permanently alienating the higher-ups. Make the point that you do not have to hire an established storyboard artist and that an animator who understands filmmaking will gladly draw a hundred boards for $200. Even if it is a wall-to-wall action film, you could get all the action storyboarded for $1000, and save yourself at least $20,000 to $30,000 in time burned up on the set trying to use words — a very rough tool — to get the pictures in your head on film.

  Furthermore, if you are shooting action, it is often most cost-effective to shoot two units. Shooting with two units is made much more feasible if you have storyboarded the sequence. This way, both units can literally work off the same page. With very little discussion, the work is precisely divided. Shots do not get dropped and the final product cuts together.