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Can big-budget blockbusters make you sick?

Michael Stahl-David and Odette Yustman in Cloverfield
  • Posted at 11:58am
  • 27 February 2009
  • by AndrewCollins-RT
  • 1 comment

The phrase "shaky camerawork" used to be a criticism, like "wobbly set" or "visible boom mic".

Now it's a way of life, a certified cinematographic technique, and sadly a ubiquitous short cut for film-makers keen to add instant realism to their work by simply leaving the tripod and the dolly tracks back in the storeroom and running around like a dad with a camcorder on sports day.

Sometimes shaky camerawork is officially a "good thing", as with the two Paul Greengrass-directed Bourne movies – The Bourne Supremacy (Saturday 28 February, ITV1) and The Bourne Ultimatum – which employ the latest in portable camera equipment to put the viewer in the thick of the high-velocity action.

But it's mostly a distraction, as in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives.

Allen used hand-held cameras some years before they were compulsory, for no apparent reason other than to lend spurious documentary realism to a perfectly good middle-age sex comedy. (He even beat TV's NYPD Blue, which helped popularise the trick, with greater justification, a year later.)

A moving camera will of course give fiction a fly-on-the-wall documentary feel.

This technique is as old as Ken Loach and is still the preferred method of the comedy "mockumentary" – perfectly demonstrated in This Is Spinal Tap, used brilliantly on TV in The Office, and at the cinema for Borat.

Now that access to film equipment is almost universal, thanks to the proliferation of mobile phones with cameras and video-sharing websites like YouTube, it's harder than ever to sift what's real from what's not. We used to believe what we saw in news footage, but it's so much easier to manipulate now, so why should we?

Cloverfield (Saturday 28 February-Friday 6 March, Sky Premiere), the Godzilla-indebted Manhattan monster mystery produced by JJ Abrams (TV's Lost; the forthcoming Star Trek movie), took this credibility gap and filled it with a new kind of blockbuster – filmed, or so we are led to believe, on one character's indestructible hand-held digital video camera.

So, while an unseen giant creature marauds through the streets of New York, we glimpse it only when the camera is turned upwards, and even then it's hard to make out.

This was a winning device for most audiences, but a one-way ticket to the bathroom for others as seasickness set in for those of a queasy disposition. A real home movie, even of sports day, would never be this shakily filmed.

For me, it worked. But it also made me appreciate the craft and beauty of the fixed shot.

You remember those. Where the camera is, you know, sort of anchored to the ground and the bits and pieces in front of it are arranged in a pleasing aesthetic and narrative fashion.

With a boom mic in shot.

No, sorry, I'm living in the past.

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  • Posted on 02 March 2009
  • at 4:22pm
  • by Jackie

Worse still are those shots that suddenly are at the side of someones face! One minute your listening face to face to what the presenter is saying next your staring at the side of his/her face!!! Its drives me insane! It's not something we do in real life after all!!!!! Who thought it would be a good idea??

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