Camera motion

[Sherlock Holmes]

I was born in 1960 and for most of my first twenty years cameras used for making movies and TV shows were - relatively - fixed, but in the mid 70s they invented the steadicam.

Since then cameras have become smaller and more mobile and this has led to a kind of filming that I absolutely hate.

Here you can see the camera is floating around the scene as the people speak, like they're using a cell phone even. This is now the norm for many new shows and movies.



I find such shows/movies hard to watch, it is absolutely unnatural, no person's view of scene ever looks like this, zooming in and out, shifting around all the time, when we look at a real scene in real life it is steady, there's no agitated left and right shifting of position and zooming in and out, in fact our brains strive to remove such motions so that we see a stable smooth image even if we are running down the road.

I prefer the older style of camera use, like you see in all films and shows prior to 1975, here the camera "sees" more or less what a person standing in the scene would see, no jaggy shifting of the image, no silly zooming.



I'm curious to hear what others think of this and are there any younger people who were raised on this newer style of camera work?

 

[daveman]

I think the idea is to mimic the viewpoint of a person who's there observing the scene.

But I agree, it can be distracting, and, if overdone, off-putting.

 

[RhodyPatriot]

I think the idea is to mimic the viewpoint of a person who's there observing the scene.

But I agree, it can be distracting, and, if overdone, off-putting.

Yeah.

I remember the "shaky camera" era.

Don't much miss it.