Examples of MCU to super wide shot with presenter

[Mark Suszko]

You could cut on a 45 or 90- degree turn, going to the bigger shot on the turn. This hits the eye with the unexpected “bigness” coming after the close-in shots. You don’t need two cameras to do it: you just need to do the line and the move twice, moving the camera from first to second position after the first good take from the starting position. I used to do this all the time in corporate/government/news stuff, to help change the mood as you go from paragraph to paragraph or idea to idea. It’s done less often now because I think people got lazy and impatient. But it looks slick and “expensive” when executed right, though it costs nothing but a little more set-up time and sometimes, a lighting tweak.

Another way to go is to rack your focus from a tight medium shot with almost no depth of field, hi angle, looking downhill a bit, to one with a tilt up to level and a long depth of field, revealing the largeness that was there all along but indistinct. This could be coupled with a simple jib-up-and rack the focus move, as the talent walks towards and then under the lens. No jib? Use a ladder and hi-hat. Or two ladders, a board, and a hi hat clamped in between. Or skip the ladders, have two grips/A.C.’s each take a hold of one end of the long board and on a signal, lift it,like a barbell, as your star walks up to it and under it. The long moment arm on the board makes it relatively stable, even hand-held.

One more idea: Communicate the Bigness by shooting in dark limbo and at the end, hit the switch and all the lights come up at once in the back. This isn’t always easy to do “live” but it can “look live” by compositing the shot in stages against a plate of “dark” and a plate of “All-On”. For that “Indiana Jones warehouse” look. Sell it with a subltle light change on the backlight of your talent in the near field, to seem like the new light is wrapping around it. And sell it with good audio of big knife switches switching and clacking on high-voltage, with lots of hum and echo. They used this gag in “The Monuments Men”. See a glimpse at a minute-thirty into this promo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czYqP1jbPTk

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.