Cinematography-Theory-And-Practice

What you will discover is that the shots probably won’t cut togethersmoothly. The chance of finding a good, clean cutting point is a longshot. It is the overlapping that helps you find smooth cut points.Here is what will work much better: you get a wide shot of himwalking in and let him take the action all the way through to puttingthe notes on the lectern. Then set up a different angle and askthe actor to back up a few steps. Once you roll the camera, the actorcomes up to the lectern again (repeating the last part of his walk).You then shoot the action all the way through to pulling up the chair.Again you halt to set up a different angle, and have the actor backup from the lectern, and repeat the action of putting down the notesand then carrying it on through to the end of the scene. All thisoverlappping will enable you to cut the action together smoothlywith good continuity cuts. The most important principal to takefrom this is to always overlap all action, no matter what shootingmethod you are using. Giving the editor some extra overlap at thebeginning or end of any shot will prevent many potential problemswhen editing the scene.In-OneOf all the methods of shooting a scene, by far the simplest is thein-one, sometimes called a oner or a developing master, or the Frenchterm plan-scene or plan-sequence. This just means the entire scene inone continuous shot. A scene might be simple as “she picks up thephone and talks” in which case a single shot is probably plenty. Somein-ones can be vastly more complicated: such as the famous fourminuteopening shot of Touch of Evil or the long Steadicam shot ofentering the Copacabana in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.A caution, however: when these shots work, they can be magnificent,but if they don’t work — for example, if you find in editingthat the scene drags on much too slowly — your choices are limited.If all you did was several takes of the long in-one, you really don’thave much choice in editing. Play it safe — shoot some coverage andcutaways just in case.Freeform MethodMany scenes theses days (and even entire movies) are shot in what iscommonly called documentary style. Think of movies like Cloverfieldor The Hurt Locker; the camera is handheld, loose, and the actor’smovements don’t seem preplanned.It seems like documentary style but it is not really. When shootinga real documentary, we can almost never do second takes, or havethem repeat an action. Our aim in shooting fiction scenes like thisis to make it seem like a documentary. In most cases, scenes like thisare shot several times with the actors repeating the scene for severaltakes. Since the camera is hand-held, the camera operator usually doestheir best to follow the dialog: they pan the camera back and forth toalways be on the person who is speaking. This can be a disaster forthe editor. Imagine that you shoot a scene three times like this. Youend up with three takes that are almost the same and the camera isonly on the actor who is talking.Imagine trying to edit these three takes together — almost impossible.What you really have are three takes that are mostly the same,which is a nightmare for editors. Editing is all about having differentangles to cut to. If all you have is three very similar takes, there arenot really any different angles to cut to. Also, you have no reactionshots of the person listening; as we discussed before, reaction shotsare important to the storytelling and the editing. So what to do?cinematography30