If It Works It Works
As filmmakers, we have all sorts of tools at our disposal: dollies, cranes, Steadicam, handheld, insert cars, drones, and on and on. Sometimes, we can get caught up in the tech and forget about what we are really there to do: to tell stories.
When a rehearsal is done, and we start to talk about the shot, I start by asking the director what kind of feel this should have. Is it static? Is there a slight move? Is it energetic? Generally, the most specific I will get with them is Does it have a handheld feel or a conventional feel? Simply because this moves me in the right direction. Note that I haven't really started to discuss what method we will use to mount/move/place the camera, but rather what the feel of the scene is. Generally, I can tell, but directors have a larger picture in mind and, sometimes, I’ll be pleasantly surprised when they have an idea I had not considered because of how it fits into the larger story.
We then discuss if there is movement, and the feeling of that movement. Is it handheld–crazy frenetic handheld or just handheld with a little bit of life, a little bit of breathing in it? If there is a move, is it fast, is it slow, is it square to the subject? Is it floaty? Is it rock solid? So many things need to be considered, and the end result is the way that shot tells the story.
I then talk with the DP and the dolly grip and backwards engineer what the best way to achieve the shot is. Sometimes it's very clear, other times it's much harder to figure out, especially when you need to get a camera somewhere its hard to get it to. And many times, the most unconventional idea is the best. Camera on a sandbag, camera on a shelf, camera in the sink. I often find the most enjoyable moments are when we can’t figure something out and someone says, “Why couldn’t we just…” Thinking outside the box is always important, and at the end of the day, if it tells the story well, it’s the right way to create the shot.
Years ago on a feature, we had very little time left at the location and the director wanted a shot of the camera sliding away from someone on the floor, underneath a bed. We started to think about it and started to come up with all sorts of ideas, when my dolly grip said “Couldn’t you just lie on a furni pad, with the camera on the pad in front of you and I could pull you backwards?” We messed around with it and, sure enough, after raising the bed up slightly, and me reaching clear across the floor, that’s exactly what we did, and it worked great.
If it works, it works.
Mind you, this doesn’t always just have to do with the camera. Recently, we were shooting a scene where a character slits the throat of another who falls on the floor and dies. The killer then sits in a chair and makes a phone call to threaten another person with the same fate. When we came around to shoot the reverses, we had the dying man in the foreground, camera low on the floor and in between camera and the killer who sat in the chair. The DP, director, and I all agreed that the shot to do was to have the man being killed fall into the foreground, and then slowly push past and over him into a closeup of the killer on the phone. The problem was this would mean converting the dolly into another mode and we didn’t have the time or even the space to make this work.
We discussed it and I asked if the director planned on cutting back and forth between the phone call. She said that she did, so I suggested that the time might not be worth it, as we could do one shot where the man falls to the floor and starts the push, freeze, move him out of the way, and then continue with the move, knowing that they would be cutting into the other side of the phone call at that moment. We all agreed, reluctantly, that this made sense. I went over to explain this to my dolly grip, one of the best i have ever had the pleasure to work with.
“Nope, nope nope. Please, I have to do this as one move!” he pleaded. “I can do it, we can make it work with the equipment right here. We just need to figure out how to get the guy on the floor out of the way. We can’t not do this, it's such a great shot that tells the whole story!”
“They're going to cut it up anyway,” I said.
“That’s their problem, not ours. When they see it they won’t. I gotta do it!” he begged. The sign of a great dolly grip, one who can’t let a great bit of storytelling get away.
I agreed, and went to the 1st AD and the director and explained what we wanted to do. I told them that we would be ready in five minutes, not quite knowing how we were going to do it.
As the dolly grip moved things into place, I considered all sorts of ideas and then, finally, thought of what ended up working: a furni pad on the floor. The actor falls on the furni pad in the foreground where camera just sees the top half of his body so the pad is hidden, and then as we push forward, our incredible key grip slid the actor out of the way and we pushed straight into an extreme closeup as the killer finished his line. It was a spectacular shot that went off without a hitch. The only thing we could have done better was to tell the actors off screen what was happening because on the first take, when the actor on the floor started sliding out of the frame, they were so surprised that they started laughing. My dolly grip was right; it was a powerful bit of storytelling and would have been a shame to miss.
