io9 
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San Francisco, 3:46 PM
Sat Nov 7
20 posts in the last 24 hours
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09/07/09
09/07/09
09/07/09
With the prevalence of home video cameras and people capturing life all around them at all times, we're becoming more attuned to hand-held camera work as being the "true" view of the world around us. And most amateur videographers not only don't use tripods or other stabilizers, but refuse to use them because it slows them down. Hence, "real" video becomes more and more shaky in our collective minds.
I feel that judicious use of "shaky cam" can be effective, and that it was used well in BSG and D9, for the most part. But if used badly, it can distract from the story enormously. As our collective tastes change, and as our cultural tolerance for amateur videography increases, I fear we'll see more and more of it in major cinema releases, not because it is the right directorial choice, but because it's what people expect.
At least until the trendiness pendulum swings back to more traditional filmmaking.
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09/07/09
The topic title is AWESOME, btw.
09/07/09
Of note: sometimes shots are filmed smoothly (or un-shakily :p) and computer plugins unstabilize them afterwards. There's a bit of an industry yin-yang joke that for some plugins that "damage" footage, there's one that heals that type. Noise addition vs. removal, for example. So there's every opportunity to fine-tune the shake and find a balance. Like gradients, there's a range of expression. It isn't ON/OFF.
This is of great interest to amateur/hobbyist and other upstart moviemakers who wonder how to shake resourcefully. Awhile ago, I did a video tutorial which is attached here. Disclosure: I'd later go on to design NewBlueFX plugins, but one of the first times I heard about their Active Camera plugin is when I googled for "shaky camera tutorial" for use with Sony Vegas. There's also the Quake script.
And I LOVE not just defly-deployed shakycam, but film artifacts that emulate old VHS and datamosh-style glitches, too!
09/07/09
The problem is that the series has influenced filmmakers who don't understand why it works. Take Quantum of Solace: they brought in the action guys from the Bourne films, so I can only assume that the footage was good, but the editor and/or director had no clue how to construct it, and it resulted in a truly awful mess -- I was genuinely lost in the same way that Bourne-haters seem to be.
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I definitely enjoyed the films, especially as adaptations of the books, I simply would have liked to have seen and enjoyed the action sequences mas.
No problems with Bourne as a whole however :)
09/08/09
But seriously, while there's definitely something to be said for a middle-distance camera and some intricate action moving within a mostly static frame (there's a sequence in Oldboy that is just mindblowing and I'd much prefer to see most films imitating that technique), I really thought that the shaking added something visceral to the Bourne films and I never found the action hard to follow.
I can't emphasize enough that this isn't praise for shakycam in general, more often than not it is horrendously misused, but in the Bourne films specifically it really works (for me).
09/07/09
One good Shaky cam scene I remember from resent years is the battle scene from Children of Men. It was a very long single-cut scene shot with a hand held camera and it was superb!
09/07/09
So ... "when in Rome" on that front, cool?
09/07/09
At other times it was unnecesary, but in most of that movie I felt like it helped identifying with the characters.
Also, Public Enemy: talk about unnecessary shake... come on, there's the cops and there's the criminals, there's no need to keep us twenty minutes without seen who is shooting who and who's dead and who's not. No need to deafen me so much either.
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09/06/09
Isn't anybody else bugged by 24 frames a second?
Would you watch a monitor with a 24 hz refresh?
09/07/09
Film, real film, has natural motion blur that's more or less what our eyes perceive.
CGI, including what your moniter shows, does not.
So we have higher frame rates that compensate.
09/06/09
Try Firefly IO9. ZOIC went from doing Firefly effects to BSG after Fox axed it. The shakycam space camera followed.
You never even MENTION Firefly. Nor Serenity!
09/07/09
BSG used it very crudely, imho.
It was always a shaky-pan then zoom.
Every single time. Shaky-pan....zoom.
Shaky-pan....zoom.
I drove me mad.
It was like they had a preset camera motion and they merely aligned the endpoint to face the ship.
09/07/09
And oddly, I thought BSG's pans looked familiar with each one, just didn't think they'd be so lazy to only program one programmed pan like that!