From: Valuemetaphysics@aol.com
Date: Wed Jun 16 2004 - 12:48:26 BST
Dear forum,
I thought you may all like to read the following. The end is very
interesting.
Part. 1.
The following is based on my opinion and experience, which may not reflect
those of all operators.
Edgar Meyer, the famed American double-bassist, has had a profound effect on
my thinking. Edgar plays a 300-year-old contrabass that is bigger than he is.
He has changed the way many people think of his instrument. He once won a
fiddling contest on his bass - proving that he had brought speed and agility to an
instrument that had always been perceived as a lumbering, sluggish giant. He
makes the bass sing like a cello, or roar like a lion.
The steadicam has long been thought of in the same way. Often burdened with
heavy sync-sound cameras, the rig can be sluggish and lumbering. But
innovations in gear and cameras have changed that dramatically.
The invention of the steadicam has had a widespread impact on every form of
filmmaking since the late 1970s. In feature films, steadicam is all about being
cinematic (rock solid moves, level horizons, fluid pans, etc). This is a
disciplined form of operating that takes years to perfect through constant
experience.
For the past three years, my view of steadicam has shifted from the original
teachings. I have been operating for six years, and have worked on every level
of production and every genre of project. Through these experiences I have
gained insight into what steadicam is and can be.
From my early days with the rig to the present, music videos have provided
the foundation of my experience. Thankfully, I am a musical person. I listen to
a diverse range of music and dabble with various instruments, mostly
percussion-based. Music videos taught me how to push the steadicam equipment beyond its
apparent limits, doing physical things never asked of me in a narrative
environment. Working between commercials, features, MOWs and music videos forced me
to switch styles all the time.
This constant change between formats and styles allowed me to see the rig in
a different light. I began to see that the steadicam is more like a musical
instrument than a piece of motion picture gear. I taught myself how to play the
steadicam like an instrument. With this new outlook, one can compare musical
genres with the major modes of operating. For example, feature films can be
thought of as "classical" operating, akin to highly skilled classical musicians
who read the music and play the composer's notes flawlessly.
Music videos, on the other hand, tend to fall more into the "jazz" school of
operating. The operator becomes more in tune with the groove and flow of a
moment, and has the freedom to improvise within the root structure of a given
shot. This is not unlike a jazz player who learns through years of jamming how to
"colour outside the lines" of a musical passage. It was this thinking that
led me to coin the term "camera soloist." Pianists are not called "piano
operators." It is simply a matter of perception.
Add the rhythmic pulsations of the camera's
movement and you have a kinesthetic response
I have focused my energies on further developing these techniques, and have
made some wonderful discoveries. With the mental concept of the rig as a
musical framing instrument deeply rooted in my head, I see the points in space that
the rig must hit to form the shot as notes, and the timing between hitting
these notes as the time signature of the shot. Once I have learned a piece of
music for a particular project, those points in space become second nature, and I
then have the freedom to improvise within that structure.
Part. 2. follows.
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