I'm not talking about cloverfield or blair witch hunt. What prompted me this time was actually the Boston Massacre 'fire' scene in John Adams, which features a long take of a skinny-armed cameraman following the lead character through alleys while attempting to achieve something that could be called 'composition'...or maybe he wasn't trying.
It's this kind of 'camera work' that irritates me. Once upon a time, movie crews used to build trolleys to move the camera along, and in the 70s this guy invented something called the 'steadycam'. For crying out loud, Firefly has HAND-HELD CG!!
Quote:
It's meant to provide a sense of immediacy, rawness, make you feel like it's less processed, more "real". |
Well, what it does is provide a sense of abstraction rather than immediacy, serving perfectly to remind me that I'm looking through a camera held in the hands of an offscreen cinematographer and filtered through the asinine production values of the director, and it makes me feel irritated, and possibly nauseated.
Not to mention it is a complete copout regarding action scenes *cough*bourne*cough*. It's like the director and producer are standing around like "Gee, maybe we should hire an action cinematographer and start training the actors....or maybe we'll just strap the camera to this beach ball and roll it through the scene".
It's like dynamic range compression in music. It doesn't make it sound louder...it makes it sound like it was poorly mastered!