Camera Work: Smooth Moves

To bring off suave and liquid moving shots, film studios use equipment that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But you can make expert, professional camera moves without any special equipment, and the results will add interest and snap to your programs.

This month's column looks at the "how" of camcorder movement: that is, how to achieve different types of moving shots. (Next month, we'll consider the whys and wherefores--the aesthetic and dramatic reasons for moving the camera from one angle to another during the shot.)

But first, two cautionary tales. Back when I was young enough to believe myself immortal, I did the cinematography on some films so cheap--er, I mean, independent--that we had no proper equipment for moving the camera. To get one moving shot, I hand-held from the top of an Econoline van as it careened down a dirt mountain road in a downpour. For another, I stuffed myself into the front trunk of a VW Karmann-Ghia and held the camera six inches above the asphalt while filming a high-speed car chase. (The camera car driver was laboring under a trifling handicap: since she had to drive with the trunk lid raised, she couldn't see most of the road.)

There is a word for macho gymnastics like this: stupid.

All camera movement carries at least some degree of risk, because you're often concentrating more on the shot than on where you're heading. Also, many people haven't mastered the trick of keeping their non-viewfinder eye open while shooting, so their vision is limited to whatever's in the frame. So, for safety's sake, follow a few common sense rules:

• Look where you're going to move before you make the shot.
• For trickier moves, especially on wheels, get someone to push/guide/drive you.
• If you can't learn to shoot with both eyes open, at least open the off-camera eye about once every second, to check out the area outside the frame.

And don't shoot from the trunks of moving VWs.

Let's start with a few tips that apply to every kind of camera move. First, set your lens at its widest angle, if practical. The wider the angle, the less obvious any camera shake will appear. Telephoto lenses, by contrast, magnify every little jiggle and jog.

Secondly, take it sloooooowly. You can turn your head quickly or look at the side of the road from a car doing 60 mph and your brain will process the visual information for you. But a camcorder can't do that; the results will be just an unpleasant blur. A good rule of thumb: move the camera just a bit more slowly than your most conservative instincts advise.

Next, learn to speed up and slow down. Movements that begin and/or end abruptly can look jarring. By gathering speed from the start of the move and then slowing down as you complete it, you impart a sense that the move has a beginning, a middle and an end.

Finally, try disabling both auto focus and auto exposure if your camcorder allows this. Moving shots necessarily entail changing distances and light levels; auto systems are often too slow to keep up. Suppose, for instance, you're dollying along inside a shady colonnade as you shoot the sunlit marketplace beyond it. The problem: every time a column moves past in the foreground, the auto focus system will try to focus on it and the exposure system will try to compensate for its dark appearance. The resulting wild swings of brightness and focus will ruin the shot. It's better to set the focus and exposure for the distant, sunny marketplace and then lock them down.

Having disposed of these generalities, let's examine the different types of camera moves.

The simplest camera moves are pans and tilts. A pan rotates the camera from side to side on its vertical axis; a tilt shifts it up and down on a horizontal axis.

With a few tricks, you can improve even these simple moves:

• When panning or tilting on a tripod, you can entangle yourself with your equipment. So if you have an external LCD screen, whether built-in or add-on, step back from the camera and pan or tilt by moving the tripod's pan handle as you check the result on the screen. If you don't have an external screen, you can still use some techniques for improving camera steadiness.
• When panning, don't stand facing the start of the shot. Instead, stand parallel to the center of the movement; then twist your upper body left or right to the start of the pan and make the pan so that you end up twisted in the opposite direction. You'll find that you can pan a full half-circle this way. (This tip works equally well when you're hand-holding: Plant your feet parallel to the middle of the pan and then twist your upper body to the start position.)
• When tilting, rotate the viewfinder to compensate for the camera movement. Suppose you want to frame the flowers at the base of a tree and then tilt all the way up to the leaves overhead. To do this, grasp the pan handle in one hand and the viewfinder barrel in the other. At the beginning of the tilt, the finder will point down. As you tilt the camera, rotate the finder so that by the time the camera points upward, the finder is at right angles to the camera and you're still comfortably looking down into it.
• You can also make a hand-held "boom" or "crane" shot, which raises the camcorder up in the air while maintaining the subject in the frame. After pressing record grasp the camera by the sides with two hands. Starting at a low level, aim the camera at your subject while you slowly raise it high overhead. An extreme wide angle lens setting is doubly important here, because you can only point the camcorder in the general direction of the subject matter.