Body

In documentary you often shoot material handheld, so the professional electronic newsgathering (ENG) camcorder (camera + sound recorder) has a sidemounted eyepiece and a body balanced to nestle on the operator’s shoulder. This allows the camcorder to become part of one’s head and shoulders (Figure 9-1). Smaller camcorders often record amazing sound and picture, but having the eyepiece at the rear means the camcorder is a free-floating appendage held ahead of your face (Figure 9-2). The lack of bodily contact produces stress in your arms, wrists, and hands when you must hold shots steady for minutes at a time. Usually, a pivoted liquid crystal display (LCD) unfolds from the side of a small camcorder so you can look into it from any angle. For low-angle shots, you look down into it; you can even face it forward so you can see framing as you speak to the camera (Figure 9-3). LCD screens work fine until you try shooting under sunlight—when the image becomes too dim to see. That’s when you need the viewfinder eyepiece. Controls are miniaturized and fiddly for larger hands and not always placed where you want them. Never doubt, however, that if you work within their limitations, they are capable of serious work.

Practice controlling all of your camcorder’s functions until their operation becomes second nature. This is your instrument; practice until you play like a pro.

FIGURE 9-1 An ENG camcorder such as the JVC HD-250 sits nicely balanced on one’s shoulder and against one’s head. (Photo courtesy of JVC.)

FIGURE 9-2 Hand-holding a small camcorder becomes stressful after a few minutes because you can’t brace it against your face or body.

FIGURE 9-3 Fold-out color screen that will even face forward.

FIGURE 9-4 Typical instructions for accessing a camcorder’s menus. (Photo courtesy of Sony Corporation.)

Learning Your Options

Consumer equipment offers variables in video and audio through tiny switches or thumbwheels. The menus these deploy look like verb tables for a foreign language (Figure 9-4). Learn what they offer, and run through all the options until you’ve used every one. Current choices show up in the viewfinder as icons, so these you must recognize, too—or discover later that all your participants have yellow jaundice because the winking saucer was trying to tell you, “Set white balance.”

Most camcorders have multiple functions. In addition to serving as a movie camcorder, yours may become a stills camera, a player, or a line recorder (meaning you can use it to rerecord like a VCR or DVD recorder). A function knob routes you to the chosen option, whereupon you face more options. The manuals holding the key to these riches are often discouragingly cramped, so it’s good to download a full-size manual from the manufacturer’s site. To absorb the manual painlessly, turn it into flash cards so you and your crew can test each other. Tossing on the high seas in a trawler is no place to start looking for the manual sound-level control.

Professional Options

Professional equipment, being rugged and physically large, allows visible, easy-to-set controls, of which there are many. Expect professional and prosumer (midway between professional and consumer) camcorders to have a black level control and a gamma (color linearity) control, as well as manual exposure, focusing, and sound level settings. Also usual are genlock (ability to electronically lock sync with other cameras and recorders) and four sound channels.

White Balance

In color work you aim to make flesh tones look natural, so the first move in digital camerawork is to set the correct white balance. This allows the camera to shoot white objects under a particular light source and show them as white onscreen, not pale pink, green, or orange. The reason is this: Although white light contains the whole spectrum, real-life light sources—including different kinds of skylight—are mixtures in which different colors predominate. Each bias is said to have a different color temperature. To compensate, you must set your camcorder’s “white balance” for shooting under that particular source. If you don’t, everyone under that supermarket fluorescent lighting turns out a bilious green.

Look for these white balance options on your camcorder:

• Automatic— not good for all situations but a necessity for some. When, for example, you must follow someone through several lighting zones, let the automatic white balance and exposure make the adjustments as you go.
• Manual— preferable under stable lighting situations. Here you want exposure and color to remain stable as the camcorder pans across differently lighted areas. Options include:
  • Preset white balance— These are factory settings that usually offer typical sunlight (which has a blue bias), typical tungsten-filament bulb light (orange bias), and typical fluorescent light (green bias). Since no light is typical, presets are approximations that you use in an emergency only.
  • Manually set white balance— Adjusting for an actual, rather than theoretical, light source is always best.
  • White balance memory—This function retains a setting when the camcorder is turned off, its battery is being changed, or you need to shoot matching material days or months later under the same lighting situation.

White balancing balances the camcorder’s response under a given light source’s color temperature. It is no match for problems arising in a scene containing mixed color temperature sources.

Shooting Under Mixed Color Temperatures

Outdoor and indoor color temperatures always vary. It’s normal to use lighting between, say, 2800 and 3200°K (degrees Kelvin) indoors and then find that what’s visible out of a window, being under 5600°K daylight, looks blue biased onscreen. You face a dilemma: White balance for the outdoor light, and the folks indoors look orange. Balance to indoor tungsten light, and the folks outdoors go bluish. Here are three approaches to shooting in mixed color temperature situations like these:

• Solution A: Do nothing. If the view out of the window is incidental and unimportant, just let it go blue. Conversely, if an incidental exterior includes a lighted room seen from outside, let it go orange. Audiences accept both as a convention of movies.
• Solution B: Tape gel filter #85 (orange) over windows. This will be invisible to the camcorder and holds back the excess blue in daylight. What light enters now matches tungsten light. White balance your camcorder to the indoor tungsten light, and colors seen outside will look normal. More significantly, daylight entering and adding to your tungsten light won’t be the wrong color temperature. Fail to filter your windows, and highlight areas will go bluish. In documentary this is not a capital offense. Watch a range of documentaries for lighting and you’ll see it.
• Solution C: Place #80A filters (blue) over your 3200°K tungsten movie lights. This holds back excess orange content so their light output now matches daylight color temperature. This method, however, at least halves the output from your lights—so they may not remain adequate. Filters for lighting get very hot and so are made of a special heatproof glass.

Can’t I Fix it in Postproduction?

Yes and no. Digital color correction in postproduction is remarkable. You can easily warm an overall cold color cast or change contrast and brightness, but changing only a single shade (a human face, for instance) without altering everything else takes advanced software and the skills of a colorist. Moral: Cure everything you can during the shoot.

FIGURE 9-5 Sunset silhouette shot enhanced through underexposure.

Manual Exposure Control

Your camcorder probably offers manual exposure control. The link may be electronic or, in more expensive camcorders, a physical lens aperture (or f-stop) control. With this you can underexpose to simulate a sunset (Figure 9-5) or overexpose to see the features of someone backlit (Figure 9-6). Lockable exposure is vital if you don’t want it to float every time a light or dark object crosses frame. The type and accessibility of the control (lever, knob, thumbwheel) are as important as its responsiveness. Positive and immediate control is good, floating and slow is not.

Automatic Exposure

The camcorder normally adjusts by averaging light in the whole frame, which only answers some situations. Even when the camera samples chosen areas of the frame, it’s easy to get undesirable effects. Don’t get into the habit of relying on automatic exposure; it will let you down when you can least afford it. In circumstances of rapidly changing light, however, only automatic exposure can maintain acceptable results. Imagine, for instance, following someone out of a car at night and into a roadside caf é. You pass through a maze of lighting and color temperature situations and need all the help you can get. Here, switching exposure and white balance to automatic can help you do a better job.

FIGURE 9-6 Detail in features of a backlit subject achieved by increased exposure. Notice the “hot” background.

Backlight Control

A backlight control compensates exposure when a subject’s major illumination is coming toward the camcorder and is thus backlit. Avoid using the preset; use manual exposure to set the exposure so you get the backlighting effect you want.

Neutral Density (ND) and Other Filters

Many camcorders have inbuilt neutral density (ND) filters. These, when you activate them, act like sunglasses, lowering the amount of light reaching the imaging chip while remaining color neutral. A one-stop reduction is a.3 rating; two stops,.6; and so on. You may need ND filtering to avoid overexposure, or you can use it to force your lens into using a larger aperture. This makes it work at a shorter depth of field, which might be useful if you wanted to throw a background or foreground out of focus.

With the addition of a matte box (see Chapter 26) to hold filters in place, you can:

• Use a color correction filter
• Cool a hot (overbright) sky with a graduated ND filter
• Simulate fog or mist with a fog filter
• Reduce contrast with a diffusion filter
• Create sparkles on highlights with a star-effect filter
• Reduce glare of water and certain metal surfaces with a polarizing filter

Picture Gain

Most camcorders have a picture gain control. This, calibrated in decibels, amplifies the camera’s response so you can still shoot in really low light situations. Useful, but expect to pay with increased picture noise (electronic picture “grain”). After you’ve used it, remember to return the gain to normal.

Interchangeable Lenses

A camcorder body that accepts interchangeable 35mm stills-camera lenses looks like a wonderful idea. When the imaging chip is smaller than a 35mm format, however, much of the image gets wasted and the advantages are largely illusory. Look instead for a good-quality zoom to which you can add diopters (supplementary enlarging lenses) when you need to alter the lens’ s range. Diopter shortcomings usually show in the widest image as a softening of focus or a vignetting (darkening and cropping) at the image corners. This is especially obvious when using a large lens aperture in low light. A fixed (non-interchangeable) zoom lens has one other, less obvious advantage—it keeps the imaging chip sealed from dirt and damage.

Focus and Depth of Field (DOF)

The camera operator, especially during handheld movements, must often rapidly adjust focus. In well-lit surroundings, focus is not critical because small imaging chips, like the 8 mm film cameras of yesteryear, have a large depth of field (DOF; see definition in box). Under low light conditions, DOF shrinks, focus becomes critical, and maintaining focus may become a struggle. The large viewfinder and mechanically positive lens control of professional cameras make this easier, but focus control on small camcorders may be an imprecise electronic connection. Some even have a lag between adjustment and seeing any results. Most, however, have a useful focus button that temporarily engages autofocusing. Expect most camcorders to offer these focusing options:

• Automatic focusing (autofocusing) is fast and accurate but depends entirely on which part of the image the optics are set to scan. Usually it’s a small area in the center of frame, but if there’s a choice, the last user may have set it differently. If so, the camcorder will duly misfocus (see Figure 9-7). Check that autofocus can be disengaged so the camcorder doesn’t hunt for focus every time the picture composition changes. Autofocus won’t usually work through glass. Either it hunts for focus or focuses on the glass instead of the subject.
• Manual focusing is preferable, but without a large, lightproof eyepiece focusing can be hit or miss. High-definition (HD) video raises the stakes—you often see misfocused footage on the nightly news. To focus manually, zoom in quickly, run through focus before settling on what’s visibly best, then quickly zoom out to the preferred image size. Try confining this procedure to unimportant action, such as a question during an interview.
• Macro focusing allows you a short focus range that often permits focus within inches of the lens—really useful when shooting small objects or images.

FIGURE 9-7 Manual focus got the kachina doll sharp, while automatic focus, sampling the center of the frame, placed the focus on the back of the composition.

Lens Protection

For everyday use, keep an ultraviolet filter (UV) on the front element of your lenses. It protects the lens from damage and inhibits UV light scatter in large landscape shots, which the digital system sees as mist. Always use a lens hood to shield the front lens element from shafts of sun or other strong light. Even when coming from outside the lens’s field of view, it strikes the lens’ s front element at an angle and causes halation (light bouncing internally between multiple lens elements). This degrades the overall picture with an admixture of white light.

Tripod and Accessories

There’s cold comfort here for the underfunded. The budget tripod and tilt head are a dismal substitute for the real deal. They may work fine for static shots, but try to pan or tilt and wobbly movements reveal why professionals use heavy tripods and hydraulically damped tilt heads. You can improve any camera movement by shooting with a wide-angle lens. Turning on the image stabilization may smooth your movements, but believe nothing until you’ve tested it.

A baby legs tripod is a very short one used for low-angle shots, and a high hat is a hat-shaped support for placing the camcorder on the ground or other solid surface. A serviceable alternative is a sandbag, which you pat into shape to allow a degree of angling.

A spreader or spider is a folding three-arm bracket that goes under the spike legs of a professional tripod (Figure 9-8). You lock the legs to the spreader so they don’t splay and collapse. A spreader also guards against scratching or denting a floor and lets you pick up the camcorder and tripod as one unit so you can plunk it down rapidly elsewhere.

FIGURE 9-8 Vinten^® tripod and spreader. (Photo courtesy of Vinten, a Vitec Group brand.)

Pan/Tilt Head Setup

At each new setup, check the spirit-level bubble built into the pan/tilt head to see that it’s level. If you don’t, you’ll pan only to find by the shot’s end that horizontals are inclined. Better tripods allow quick leveling through a ball-and-cup system (Figure 9-9).

Adjust the head to give some drag when you pan or tilt to help smooth your movements. If your head permits, position the camcorder’s center of gravity so you balance its weight equally over the pivoting point. If you don’t, it may roll forward or back when you momentarily let go of the pan handle.

Quick-Release Plate

This bolts to the base of the camera and in one movement mates instantly with the pan/tilt head (Figure 9-10). Later, if you switch to handheld operation, you can instantly free the camera by pulling a single lever. Take care that the camera is securely mounted; some quick releases are dangerously sensitive if your sleeve catches the lever.

FIGURE 9-9 Ball-mounted tripod heads make fast leveling easy.

FIGURE 9-10 Quick-release plate screwed to underside of the camera allows it to instantly separate from the tripod head in one movement. This Manfrotto tripod head lets you center the camera’s weight for balanced tilting.

Mobile Support Systems

A practiced and well-coordinated human being makes an excellent mobile cam-corder support. For a small-format camera during long-take shooting you may need a shoulder brace (Figure 9-11). For more ambitious work involving movement, try using one of the Glidecam (Figure 9-12; www.glidecam.com), VariZoom (www.varizoom.com), or Steadicam^® (www.steadicam.com) systems. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady used one to good effect in Jesus Camp (2006, United States), their frightening film about the religious conditioning of young children. After grooming young children with a mixture of inspiration and fear, fundamentalist preachers whip them up in preparation for future leadership roles to “take back America for Christ.” The gliding, swooping camera complements the kids’ agitation as they reach a weeping, speaking-in-tongues fervor.

FIGURE 9-11 VariZoom DV Traveler shoulder brace for comfortable extended handheld shots. (Photo courtesy of VariZoom Lens Controls.)

For a dolly, use a wheelchair with its tires a little underinflated. Professional dollies run on tracks like a miniature railroad. Your production must fully justify the outlay because they are heavy to transport, expensive to rent, and labor intensive to use. If your film is a historical reconstruction, for example, you may need all the equipment and expertise of a feature film crew. Before you get to this point, you can shoot perfectly good tracking shots:

• Backwards out of a car trunk or station wagon
• Forward or sideways off a tripod tied down inside a car with bungee cords and shooting through any window aperture
• Forward from a camcorder securely roped to the car hood with a towel under it to protect the car surface

FIGURE 9-12 Glidecam^® Smooth Shooter. Capable of very sophisticated camera movements, such camera supports need a lot of practice. (Photo courtesy of Glidecam.)

Minimize movement and road vibration by using a wide-angle lens. You can also smooth a tracking shot during postproduction by applying a degree of slow motion.

Handheld

Shooting handheld often means holding the camcorder in front of your face, so your steadiness deteriorates as your arms get tired. You may need a shoulder brace for long take work (Figure 9-11). Most camcorders incorporate image stabilization technology that somewhat compensates for unsteadiness, but this can introduce a weird movement lag.

Practice all the major controls until your fingers automatically find everything that matters—sound level, exposure, focus, zoom, and so on. Every cam-corder you ever use will have limitations, so practice your instrument until you can always get professionally respectable results.

When to Use a Tripod

When deciding whether to use a tripod or go handheld, simply ask yourself what experience you want the audience to have. At a young children’s birthday party, you’d get among the kids with a handheld camera, because this height and viewpoint augment their perception of themselves. The point of view of an uncle standing apart would be more grounded and best taken from a tripod, as would the kind of interview you see in Figure 9-13 where Nancy Schiesari is directing Tattooed Under Fire (a work in progress for a KLRU/ITVS production).

Sometimes your subject calls for complete mobility, so you sacrifice some stability for nimbleness. When the audience sees the need for compromise, it can well accept it. Other times, you want to use a telephoto lens and can only do so from a tripod-mounted camera.

The worst misuse of a handheld camera is for wide shots of buildings or landscapes. Our perception of such things, unless we are inebriated or suffering an earthquake, is of things solid and secure, so common sense dictates that you place the camera on a stable support.

Focusing

Finding focus while the camera is running is an accepted part of filming actuality. To focus:

• Zoom in close
• Run focus back and forth to find its sharpest setting
• Zoom back to the size of shot you want

FIGURE 9-13 Typical setup using tripod-mounted camera for off-axis interviewing in Tattooed Under Fire. (Photo by Rebecca Adams, courtesy of Nancy Schiesari.)

Viewfinder and Movements

Rehearse with the recordist where your edges of frame are going to be in different sized shots. Once the camera is running, run your eye periodically around the edges of your composition. You want to assess your composition as a whole, not simply put your subject in the crosshairs like a rifleman. You also want to detect microphone or other intrusions straight away. Watch for telltale shadows (of the microphone, for instance). When you intend panning or tilting the camera to a new composition, momentarily open your closed eye to check where you mean to go, and then make the movement. When you are about to make a strong camera move, try to flash a hand or facial warning so you don’t catch the recordist by surprise. He or she should constantly be checking your movements as well as those by the subject.

Error Recovery

If you under- or overshoot and alight on an incorrect framing, hold the erroneous composition for a few seconds and then imperceptibly “creep” the frame to its correct proportions. To acknowledge error by recovering too quickly makes the audience feel insecure.

Walking a Camera Handheld

When making a handheld tracking shot:

• Bend your knees a little so you glide rather than bob up and down.
• Turn your feet a little outward, duck fashion, and put your feet down in a straight line so you don’t sway from side to side.
• Draw (not lift) each foot over the floor surface so you can:
  • Make an imperceptible weight transfer from foot to foot, rather than stomping.
  • Feel any bump or stair before having to deal with it.
• Use the camerawork projects listed earlier in this chapter to develop your skills

Here’s how to develop the camera operator’s Groucho Marx gliding walk:

• Pin 12 feet or more of string horizontally a few inches below your head height so you must flex your knees and lower your center of gravity to walk beneath its length.
• Practice moving along its length without a camera, until your body has learned how to glide in a straight line. With no swaying or bobbing, keep your scalp just brushing the underside of the line. Note how much you’ve modified your habitual walk in order to achieve true straight-line travel.
• For an extra challenge, add low floor bumps.
• Now do it while the camera is running and rate your performance. Walking beside a brick wall at 2-foot distance gives a really revealing reference for steadiness.

Body Mechanics

Whatever camera movement you make, always try to:

• Position yourself when panning so you turn from an uncomfortable to a comfortable holding position.
• Stop in a position that allows you to move smoothly onward to the next composition.
• If you must kneel, sink on one knee only, or you won’t be able to rise without jerking the camera.
• If you sit down, place one or both feet under you so you can rise without rolling forward.

Golden Rule #1: Be Prepared for the Worst

Optimism and filmmaking are bad bedfellows. One blithe optimist left the sound tapes of a feature film in his car trunk overnight. The car happened to be stolen, and there being no copies, a vast amount of work was transformed instantly into so much silent footage. Imagination expended darkly at predicting the worst makes you carry spares, special tools, emergency information, first-aid kits, and three kinds of diarrhea medicine. A pessimist never tempts fate and, constantly foreseeing the worst, is tranquilly productive compared with your average optimist.

Golden Rule #2: Test it First

Whoever checks out equipment should arrive early and assemble and test every piece there and then. Nobody should ever assume that because the equipment is coming from a reputable company, everything will be all right. Murphy is waiting to get you. (Murphy’s Law: “Everything that can go wrong will go wrong.”) Expect him to lurk inside everything that should fit together, slide, turn, lock, roll, light up, make a noise, or work in silence. The whole Murphy clan lurks in every wire, plug, box, lens, battery, and alarm clock. Make no mistake; they mean to ruin you.