Hollywood Camera Technique, the World’s Standard

Keep reading to learn how to get a huge discount on this fantastic learning resource.

Hollywood camera technique is admired and emulated around the world for it’s sophistication style of storytelling. Truly an art form, it’s what makes Hollywood’s blockbuster films so popular. Blocking and staging are the correct terms to use to describe the process that a cinematographer and film director use to determine how to best place the lens of the camera to follow the action of the actors.

The style has grown and evolved over the last 100 years as innovations have appeared and been enhanced. Filmmakers will find only one way to quickly learn these indispensable techniques, but more on that in a moment.

At the start, silent films were filmed with fixed tripods leading to static and boring films. Mixing in close-ups with the long shots added variety and improved the storytelling.

The moving dolly, where the camera is moved on a track, lets the audience have the sensation of being part of the scene and made it practical for the actors to perform and move at the same time. Back projection is the method where an existing film shot is projected onto a semi-transparent screen from behind. Then the actors perform in front of the screen and appear to the audience to be in a foreign location or part of a special effects world of monsters such as King Kong.

Cranes allowed the audience to view the scene from a bird’s eye view and was used to awesome effect during the Atlanta rail yards scene from Gone with the Wind. It was also a favorite of Alfred Hitchcock and added a sense of disorientation to movies such as Notorious and Psycho.

The invention of the Steadicam device allowed scenes to be filmed with the effect of flying or floating by a camera operator outfitted in the clever body harness.

Chroma key using green or blue background screens permitted color film productions to combine live actors with models and special effects in a more flexible and believable way than back projection.

Most Hollywood films now combine all of these techniques using computer controlled moving cranes to achieve a hand held camera feel in scenes where live actors interact with computer generated 3D elements and scales models.

It takes years and years of experience to put together a complete vocabulary of camera placement that can be combined to effectively tell a story. Film schools don’t have the necessary equipment or the time to devote to teaching cutting edge scene staging and blocking. At any time there are only a handful of the most trained filmmakers who have the full depth of understanding of the power of camera manipulation to tell a story.

Yet without understanding of the language of the interaction between camera and actors in a scene the end outcome invariably look amateurish and fail to measure up to the visual standards of any of the Hollywood blockbusters. Many independent films have failed to become winners at the box office despite original stories and great acting because they just didn’t look like a real movie in the eyes of the audience.

Filmmakers outside of the United States are especially unable to learn the best ways to film a story because they lack access to the few sources that teach any of these skills.

In 2004 the situation improved when a visual learning course, appropriately named Hollywood Camera Work, was put together on DVDs by Per Holmes. Mr. Holmes, a highly accomplished music producer, music video director and film director, wanted to expand his understanding of blocking and staging but discovered that there were no textbooks or courses that taught the subject in any depth.

The effort took years of interviewing filmmakers and stepping through films to collect each of the secret methods of the master cinematographers and directors. He came to the realization that a book or typical video couldn’t fully convey the subtleties. He determined that only using computer generated 3D virtual sets could he clearly allow the student to see the fine details of each method from every angle and then finally to see the effect through the camera’s eye.

In all you will get more than 9 hours contained on 6 DVDs illuminating every technique of cameras placement and scene staging from the most basic to the most advanced. Hollywood Camera Work is simply a complete master class and has been accepted as the standard reference by all the leading film schools. Hollywood’s own studios are now the largest customers for this product.

Mr. Holmes recommends that film students take responsibility for their own education as film schools rarely give the depth of information necessary to really make it in the filmmaking world. Products like Hollywood Camera Work deliver a level of access to knowledge that no film school class can match.

He says, “What you actually need is access to quality information, and then you need to train and train.”

Even though the course costs less than a single class at a top end film school that is still costly for some struggling young movie makers. Check the Hollywood Film Works site for the video samples to see if this product might be useful for you. You can learn more at 4Filmmaking.com.