Cinematography-Theory-And-Practice

Figure 4.7. (top) This wide masterfrom The Lady from Shanghai showsa normal perspective.Figure 4.8. (bottom) In the closeups,Welles uses projections of thefish at ten times their normal size tointroduce menace and a feeling ofstrangeness to the otherwise pleasantsetting of the aquarium. Thehuge fish and the rippling motivatedlighting from the water all worktogether to suggest that the characteris “in over his head and out of hisdepth.”and therefore is abstracted. It is more of a presentation of the idea ofmovement than perceived as actual movement of the subject. This isespecially effective with shots of the actors running directly towardthe camera; as they run toward us, there is very little change in theirimage size. We would normally think of this as decreasing the senseof movement, but in a way, it has the opposite effect. The same istrue of slow motion. Although shooting at a high frame rate actuallyslows the movement down, our perceptual conditioning tells us thatthe people or objects are actually moving very fast — so fast thatonly high-speed shooting can capture them on film. Thus shootingsomething in slow motion and with a long lens has the ultimateeffect of making the moving seem faster and more exaggerated thanit really is. The brain interprets it in a way that contradicts the visualevidence.This is an excellent example of cultural conditioning as a factor infilm perception. The convention to show someone running very fastto shoot with a long lens and in slow motion. If you showed a longlens, slow motion shot of someone running to a person who hadnever seen film or video before, they might not understand at allthat the person is running fast. More likely they would perceive theperson as almost frozen in time through some sort of magic.cinematography58