Production Treatment

Effective production techniques do not necessarily involve extensive facilities. A slow, continuous panning shot over the scene of desolation following an earthquake can convey its extent, and the sheer brooding despair, far more significantly than an elaborate intercut montage.

Back to basics

You can think of each shot as an‘information package’. Ideally, a series of shots within any sequence or scene should form a continuous thought process in an argument or a story line. Each shot in a sequence should normally develop logically from the last… unless you are aiming at a sudden dramatic or comic impact. If your audience cannot follow the linkage between shots, they are likely to be distracted, as they try to work out what is happening.

Formality and informality

By careful composition, you can direct and hold the viewer’s attention. But if the picture appears too deliberately‘arranged’, it can look unnatural and mannered. Some directors have tried to create an ‘informal’ style, by using a hand-held camera ‘subjectively’. Where the ‘formal’ method would cut to someone who interrupts during a discussion, the ‘informal’ method would pan around the scene and zoom in on them, even if focus has to be corrected and the shot wavers. When you are working with a single camera, this might be your only option, but it is a method to be used with care. It has been introduced into documentaries, where, for example, to create an exciting subjective effect when exploring a battlefield, the hand-held camera has jumped, run and climbed, to the sound of fighting. Whether this added to the exposition, or was simply a visual gimmick, brings us to the borders of taste and judgment .

The right approach

There is no ‘correct’ way to present a subject; but there are certainly many wrong ones! Inappropriate techniques can confuse, mislead, or simply be ineffectual. Successful methods can produce such a smooth flow of events that the audience is completely unaware of the mechanics of the production. if the viewer thinks, ‘Oh boy ! What a great zoom!’, then he has been affected more by the techniques than the subject… yet it’s the subject that matters. Directors are sometimes carried away with their own ‘cleverness’, for instance by intercutting a sequence of shots to the beat of fast music. The result may be fascinating, but it does nothing to convey ideas, and it will probably frustrate the viewer with tantalizing glimpses.