228 Making Your Masterpiece: Shooting and Importing Video
Justify Any Movement
Your camcorder is small. It’s light. It fits in your hand. It seems natural to walk
around with the thing recording, shooting up and down, left and right, following
people around, and so on. But effective camera technique is all about choosing
a particular subject and filming that one thing.
To help you make the best use of the moving camera, learn and practice the
following three rules of camera movement.
Rule 1:
The single most important rule about moving the camera is that
you should never move the camera without a reason. Something must
motivate the camera movement; otherwise the viewer doesn’t know what
to look at. Why are you moving the camera? If you can’t answer that ques-
tion, stay put! One common trick is to follow an object. A bird flying by
might motivate a pan; so might a car going across a bridge.
Rule 2:
Practice the move before you press Record. If you know where
you’re going to start and stop the movement, you can move confidently
and stop cleanly. If you’re figuring it out as you go, your audience will feel
your ambivalence, and they’ll stop paying attention to the subject of the
shot and start thinking about you shooting it.
Rule 3:
Always let the camera run for a few seconds before you begin
the camera move and for a few seconds after you stop. This extra room
around the edges of your camera move will be essential when you get to
the editing room.
One more critical bit of advice: Always let people enter and exit the frame. We
all have a natural tendency to follow people as they move around, but when
you’re editing, it’s very difficult to make a smooth edit when the camera keeps
following people. Rather than pan around to follow someone’s movement,
let them exit the frame in one shot, then frame up the next shot and let them
walk into it. Presto! You’ll have a beautiful seamless edit.
Think of moving the camera as a special effect—it’s fun and can produce cool
results, but it’s also something you should reserve for when the moment is right.
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