1 The Director of Photography – an overview

172 Practical Cinematography
Figure 19.10 A wide-angle
perspective
Keeping the audience at arm’s length
If you look back at Figure 19.9, you can see an example of just how
bad things can get if you are not acutely aware of the fact that, with
your camera placement, you are transporting your audience.With very
few exceptions, one would never take a camera this close to an artist.
There is a common phrase of keeping something ‘at arm’s length’ and
this description has not come about by accident.We all have our physical
space – that is, the actual area around our person that we would
feel threatened if another person were to come inside it. For most of
us it extends around us by an arm’s length. If someone comes nearer
to us than the stretch of our arm, we are going to feel threatened.
In Figure 19.9 the nodal point of the lens, and therefore your audience,
must be around two feet or 50 centimetres from the woman’s
face. We have taken our audience within her physical space and are
therefore asking either another protagonist in the script we are photographing
that the camera is now playing or the audience itself to
threaten the artist – something that should only be done intentionally,
and rarely, and only when the script demands it.
Subjective and objective shots
Camera placement and the perspective created by your choice of focal
length can seriously affect how the audience feels about their relationship
with the scene. Figure 19.10 has been taken on a very-wideangle
lens; the impression this gives the audience is that they, or at
least the person the camera is playing, are almost about to jump over
the wall.They are highly involved with the action or positioning of the
camera and the perspective conveys the idea of a dynamic movement
into the garden and towards the house. This effect is described as