camerawork

Apologies for the delayed post this week, guys – I’ve been working on what I hope will be the final draft of the animatic for Death Knight Love Story. Just some rough foley work to do now, but it’s been eating my brains all week.

Anyway. I asked in various places for suggestions on things you’d like to know about, and Armanus, on the Moviestorm forums, mentioned that he’d really like some camerawork advice.

Now, historically, I’ve always been very twitchy about my camerawork. I didn’t come at filmmaking from a visual arts background – I still can’t draw anything except stick figures (although those seem to go down pretty well, to be fair). I’m a writer. And my first attempts at camerawork, way back in 1997 with the first Eschaton episode, Darkening Twilight (which sadly doesn’t appear to exist on the Web any more), sucked more balls than a Roomba loose in a marble factory. (No, seriously. At one point the camera actually wanders off and inspects a bookshelf whilst the dialogue continues uninterrupted. )

As such, I’ve always been on the lookout for tips to improve my camerawork. And frankly, most of the ones I’ve found suck. They’re either far too specific and situational (“This camera dolly is awesome if you’ve got exactly 15 men and one dog in your scene”) or they’re very general and wishy-washy (“Make sure to think about colour theory”).

But over the years I’ve found a few things that are simple, possible to follow whilst you’re actually making stuff at some speed, and if you follow them will invariably make your camerawork better.

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