Camera in Motion - Mode Means Method

Of the many things that filmmaking may be said to be it is, above all, a process of problem solving. What exists tangibly for a filmmaker is a need to illicit a specific set of emotions and responses from the viewer - to make them feel, look, view, consider and engage with an idea in a particular way. Once that ‘idea’ (be it narrative or otherwise) decided upon, the process of making the work into existence is one of solving the problems that the execution of that idea throws up.

So far so good…

The problems to be solved might be creative, logistical, technical or dramatic; they might be concerned with staging, performance, lighting or editing but it is in the solving and overcoming of these problems that style, form and cinematic art is delivered. Whilst cinema might be said to encompass and draw upon All the arts of painting, scupture, music, theatre and performance, there are also distinct components of cinema’s DNA that are unique and belong only to Cinema. Foremost among these is the ‘moving camera’. Whilst other arts have moving subjects and an arrangement of space, no other art possesses the ability to deliberately and overtly move the viewer through space.

The moving camera is pure cinema.

Thus for the filmmaker the problem-solving surrounding the application of the moving camera is at the very heart of the cinema experience.  But like any artistic ‘tool’, movement is but a colour on the artist’s palette, a paint which may be smeared carelessly and without consideration just as easily as it may be deftly and skillfully applied.

What follows is a structure for providing the filmmaker with a clear mechanism for devising solutions to problems of movement. Rather than another litany of how camera movement may be interpreted in an academic way, it is intended as a means by which filmmakers may inform their cinematic problem solving by conjoining conceptual impetus with the mechanics of production.

Read the complete article HERE.