Shooting on White Background…

[Mark Suszko]

I don’ think would try a lot of shakey-cam stuff or whip pans on the old folks, no matter what. It’s all about the context defining what’s apropriate. i do have an idea of you want to jazz it up a little…

You can make things more kinetic thru multiple cuts where objects in the field of view have been shifted, like jump cuts. Every time the eye and brain detct a discontinuity, they force more attention, so as to evaluate what is new in the scene. This style of shooting should e a little easier on your encoding, because it’s all straight cuts without motion, so you need fewer of those B frames or whatever they’re called.

How do you use this technique with the older people? You set up a locked-off camera looking at a lot of layered depth in the shot: things in the foreground, the background, and in-between. Then you move the subject around that set and have them static in one area for a number of questions, and another area for some more, etc. This can be edited with slow dissolves between the re-positions for a different feel than the hard cuts. If you shoot a “plate” of that set without anyone in it, you can do some very emotionally-charged dissolve type appearances and disappearances within the set.

I used this technique on a highway road safety spot a year or two back. Interviewed a woman who’d been hit by speeding/sloppy drivers while she was a construction zone flagger. We went to the cemetery where her brother was buried: he’s been killed by a speeding and careless driver in a work zone.

I set up the wide shot using a high angle, psuedo-crane shot created by clamping a hi-hat to a 10-foot stepladder. I pre-set the focus to make sure when she was very close, she’d be sharp, and I had a lot of DOF so she was sharp all thru the scene.

I had her walk into the shot from about 200 feet out wearing a wireless and just talking extemporaneously about and to her dead brother about the folks left behind, how they were getting along in his abscence. It was lucky for us that using this shooting/editing technique, we didn’t reuire long, perfect master takes or repeatability in what was said, because the poor lady broke down anumber of times going over the pain of the loss. We all had to take breaks here and there. As long as the camera never moved, none of that mattered.

I then posed her in various spots within the frame, sometimes breaking the rule of thirds on purpose. Some of he time she was just standing there looking up at the lens, or at the grave, sometimes she was speaking as well. In each zone of the shot, we asked a couple interview questions and had her tell the guy’s story, and also pitch out a few tag lines. Talk, move her, talk some more. Finished with a plate shot, as described earlier, so she could de-materialize out of the shot of the headstone, leavng him behind, alone.

The rest of the job was just picking and choosing clips and audio in the edit room and rapidly dissolving her pop-ups in various areas of the scene, with music and Foley. She gave us a wealth of emotionally heavy material to work with; I could have done multiple spots or even a 15-minute mini-doc with what we gathered in that hour. The finished product came out quite honest and arresting, I thought, considering we just threw it together in an hour’s time, with no special rigs or grip gear other than a reflector and the ladder.

So maybe you can do something like this with your seniors. One of the side benefits of it is it really opens up possibilities for you to move voiceover and on-camera speech clips around, to tighten-up narratives that tend to ramble… oops. like I’m doing!;-)

Let us know how your gig goes.

[Jeffrey Gould]

well you certainly are a detail oriented person…a good trait. I can picture the whole segment, for some reason, I also picture blur ins and outs…but I guess you said that with DOF. I will save your suggestion for another shoot…for this one each person interviewed will play in their own flash player window so I don’t have the luxury of a longer form to establish a mood or style. Each clip is its own entity. I should reiterate that the seniors are the audience, not the talent. I’m sure your ideas will help others as well…the beauty of sharing. Thank you

Jeffrey S. Gould
Action Media Productions