-
A technical editing critique of Letterman’s “My Next Guest”
-
[Oliver Peters] “First is the director’s desire to have constantly moving cameras. These obviously will reach the end of their travel and often at undesired points, which will force unmotivated cuts. “
This is a very important point.
The notion that you can have cameras move continuously without a plan as to why they are moving is completely absurd.
But in this situation, because you don’t know how the conversation is going to unfold, the movement is entirely unmotivated. Which means that it’s the purest luck if the movement actually benefits the end result rather than fighting it.
Movement without motivation is almost always very frustrating because as viewers we are conditioned to think that there is a motivation. Consequently we end up having our attention drawn to things that we should never have noticed.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Simon Ubsdell] “The notion that you can have cameras move continuously without a plan as to why they are moving is completely absurd.”
I’ve done a lot of these types of interview edits in corporate work. The director simply has the side camera on a slider of some type and it’s constantly moving back and forth slowly. There’s no control of where the camera is or whether it’s traveling left of right at any given time, since the conversation is unstructured. Then invariably in the edit you try to resist the director’s desire to cut to the camera when it’s looking slightly at the back of the person’s ear. ☺
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
-
[Oliver Peters] “Then invariably in the edit you try to resist the director’s desire to cut to the camera when it’s looking slightly at the back of the person’s ear. “
I think we’re just showing a lack of sensitivity here.
Ears can be very expressive.
If you’re an elephant!
😉
-
Something my shop does a lot of these days is oral history interview recordings. We cover a lot of various subjects; from veterans of various wars, to politicians, to farmers and “regular folks”. But we shoot them all the same way; with essentially static cameras from a wide 2-shot, and a medium iso of the guest, plus a single of the interviewer that isn’t iso’d.
I switch these shows live in standard talk-show type format, only without breaks, and I stay on the guest a lot more often without reaction cut-aways, than I would for, say, the public affairs politics talk shows we shoot for local access distribution. Those are done in a pretty conventional manner.
But it’s different for the oral history gigs, which can run into multi-hour, multi-day sessions. I’m cutting not just for the present, but preserving clean versions for some future director and editor or scholar.
So no fancy trucking moves, no jib tongue moves, no sliders, no whip pans, just plain. simple. documentation… of a conversation that’s engaging enough to the viewer not to need any tricks.
A person might think: “well, that’s some pretty static directing – you could up the drama quite a bit with more camera motion and more kinetic pacing of cuts and angles.”
They’d be wrong.
You really don’t need embellishment for a man telling you how at 16 he lied his way into the Air Force and after less than a full year of training, got assigned to a B-17 bomber …and piloted his first mission – his very FIRST mission at the controls – into the disastrous daylight raid on Schweinfurt. You don’t need a slider on the shot when you can look into his eyes and hear him describe how the flack was so thick it looked like the sky was paved with stone and you could walk home on it… how desperately at that moment he wanted to walk home on it, because something like 3/4 of the men he took off with were falling to the Earth in flames to every side of him, the whole damn time he was clenching that yoke and fighting his every natural inclination to press on to a target and make a drop, before he could turn around…
And then he had to do that job another twenty-four times. And living with what he’d seen and experienced. Lives he took, and lives he saved.
You don’t need special camera moves for that. Or fancy switcher solos. You shut up, stand back, and let the story tell itself.
My cuts, when I do make them, are used to frame a section or “punctuate” a tale being told, and that’s all the “enhancement” we want in this kind of thing. Because we also keep camera isos, someone in the future can overrule my directing decisions as they like, or extract unmodified passages of the recording to suit whatever their future needs are. The shots are made a little wider than usual so there’s room to add virtual pans or zooms in post somewhere down the line. But we don’t add any fancy razz-matazz when we shoot it. The story doesn’t need tricks to be compelling.
We keep it real.
-
I have shot many interviews, mostly single camera with a locked shot. Time permitting I may change the zoom amount between questions. On a few occasions I have parked a 2nd camera next to the main camera for a locked off closeup, for smoother editing. A few times I have setup a 2nd or 3rd locked off camera with a side view like it being discussed here, but only to give some variety for editing out content, rarely for a creative purpose. I agree that these Letterman interviews seem to be using more cameras to try to make a static interview visually more interesting, but it is not enough justification for some of the shots.
A couple of years ago I went to a TEDx event. Each talk has one person standing center stage, with a remote control to advance slides. The event was live switched for I-MAG with 3 cameras. A master medium shot, a closer shot and a camera on stage right which alternated between a side view of the speaker and audience reaction shots. In a live switching situation this can work well, as the 1,000 people in the audience were often laughing, crying, clapping or smiling. Depending upon what the speaker was doing the side view may or may not have been appropriate, and it is up to the director or TD to make those decisions in real time.
These Letterman interviews are conducted in a theater with an audience, so I wonder if there is live switching for I-MAG, and then they re-edit from ISOs or tweak the live switched recording. I have done both methods with multi-camera events.
I have only watched the Obama episode, but this show is in my queue along with about 500 other shows!
Mike
-
IMAG is a unique case and you can’t really do IMAG well and expect it to also cut well for conventional use
-
Dang, I missed this discussion the first time around and I’m REALLY late to this AND kinda bummed I missed it at the time.
Because, of course, I have a bit of a contrarian observation.
(But at least one built around a real life experience!)
I consume media in the same way most of you guys do. I watch the presentation hoping to be engrossed with it such that my disbelief is suspended and I become immersed in the narrative. I FOCUS on it from the first frame. It’s how I was trained with DECADES of sitting in darkened theaters or living rooms with single choice content delivery modes at one time.
That’s my default expectation.
But a few years back, I watched my then teenage son watch content in our living room – and realized his entire experience of consuming media was massively different from mine.
He had the Television, his Laptop, an iPad and his phone engaged all at once and he was scanning and interacting with each. He essentially had a “curation state” in play – assessing which feed he would access at any given time.
Movement, change, visual richness – THOSE aspects would draw his attention to one of the other, in turn.
Is this good or bad? That’s WAY too big a topic for me to address. But it’s how his attention was being engaged.
It’s VERY possible, I suspect, that Letterman’s show is edited to POP from this type of modern scanning feed. To present more variety, more visual change, more INTEREST to someone scanning across content looking for something to watch.
It MIMICS his viewing consumption style much more closely than traditional style editorial. Constantly searching, scanning, seeking – for good or ill.
Just an observation – and certainly one that I could be entirely wrong about. But that Letterman interview style might have way more opportunity to appeal to someone of Mike’s conditioning – than it does for someone of my conditioning.
Just food for thought.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Bill Davis] “But a few years back, I watched my then teenage son watch content in our living room – and realized his entire experience of consuming media was massively different from mine.”
My kids also consume media in that way.
[Bill Davis] “It’s VERY possible, I suspect, that Letterman’s show is edited to POP from this type of modern scanning feed. To present more variety, more visual change, more INTEREST to someone scanning across content looking for something to watch.”
Interesting idea of creating the programming in such as way as to attract younger eyeballs but I’m not sure this show is attempting to do that. The reason I doubt it is because Letterman’s audience is naturally going to skew on the older side. Netflix is also such a powerhouse that it doesn’t really matter how good or bad the viewing numbers are for Letterman’s show. Letterman just adds yet even more prestige to the Netflix portfolio. I think Netflix has surpassed HBO at this point as the premiere “network.”
But TV being the tramp that it is, I’m sure a lot of programming today is consciously being made with the thought of how to attract those young eyeballs.
The encouraging thing that I see with my own kids is that they will watch a wide variety of traditional style programming just as intently as new media as long as the storytelling is compelling.
Windows 10 Pro
i7-5820k CPU
Nvidia GeForce GTX 970
Blackmagic Decklink 4k Mini Monitor
Adobe CC 2018
Renders/cache: Samsung SSD 950 Pro x2 in Raid 0
Media: Samsung SSD 960 PRO PCIe NVMe M.2 2280
Media: OWC Thunderbay 4 x 2 Raid 0 mirrored with FreeFileSync -
[greg janza] “But TV being the tramp that it is, I’m sure a lot of programming today is consciously being made with the thought of how to attract those young eyeballs.”
It strikes me a little bit like the “wide verses tall” thing.
Taken JUST in the context of content viewing – most all of us go for for wide every time. Even to the point of ridiculing people who shoot “vertical videos.”
Yet I look at the splash page of Netflix today – and what do I see?
Poster frames set as BOTH vertical and horizontal. They want more options to attract eyeballs to the promoted content above – and then are happy to switch to a horizontal layout when the choice is made to dive deeper. Some of those will undoubtedly be the “smartphone” poster frames – others will be served to laptops and other wide screen modes.
I think there’s a design aesthetic at work here that’s increasingly common. Catch first – extrapolate later.
Interesting to think about.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
Speaking of unmotivated camera work, lately I have noticed on Meet the Press they have a couple of fast jib or dolly like shots per episode. It is during the discussion at the big table with 4 guests and the host. If it were a slow move it would be better, in my opinion. The fast move calls attention to itself and takes my attention out of the conversation.
In contrast on Today they do a steadycam or crane shot before the 7:30 commercial break where the camera goes about 180 degrees around the anchor desk. It is quick and fun but the Today show is supposed to be an energetic morning show so it is a fun camera move.
Good camera work is supposed to be invisible to the viewer and be motivated by the story or subject matter. Drones are starting to become overused in some shows also. It is cool that you can do something that once would have required a chopper, but these dramatic shots where the camera goes from ground level to 300 feet seem to be saying “hey, we have a drone!” If it helps tell the story go for it, but too much of a good ting can become too much.
Mike
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up