Today we're going to be mixing some practical demonstration
with a little bit of pedantry as we talk about the fundamental
camera movements and how to refer to them correctly.
Oh, yeah, and we're going to be doing it on a slightly excessive
but very cool motion control rig.
Let's get Undone.
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening everybody? I'm Gerald Undone
and let's get jiggy with it.
["Getting' Jiggy Wit It" by Will Smith]
So, today's video is sponsored by edelkrone,
which means two things. One, I'm going to be
giving away some motion control hardware
to one lucky commenter on this video, and two, I'm going
to be flexing my motion control rig throughout
this video as I explain the camera movements.
Alright, so there's six fundamental camera movements
that we're going to cover as well as two bonus
lens movements, and then some compound movements
which are created from combinations of those.
So, let's jump over to the bench
and we'll start with probably the most
well-known movement, the pan.
[Batman transition sound]
Now I made a whole separate video on panning
and how it relates to frame rate judder
and speed control, and I highly recommend you watch that video
if you want to know more about keeping your shot smooth,
but the gist of it is that you have to control how quickly
you make these movements, whether you're panning,
or any other movement for that matter,
in order to prevent getting an unwanted flickering
or stuttering effect. Also, panning,
like many other camera movements, is improved
when you use a fluid head or add enough weight and resistance
to overcome the natural shakes of your hand.
Or you can just let robots from the future do it for you
With edelkrone's new HeadONE, which can pan up to 15lb
of camera gear, and can actually do a lot more than that.
And this is one of the units that I'm going to be
giving away, but we'll get more into that a little later on.
Now normally you would put a head on this thing which is why
there's a 3/8 inch screw on the top of it.
But if you have a 3/8 to 1/4-20 adapter,
you can actually attach your camera right to it.
This thing uses Cannon LP-E6 batteries,
which is good because they're pretty ubiquitous
and it's controlled using the edelkrone app.
Now at this point you have two options. You can either manually
pan it by holding the pan dial to one side and you can
see that the camera is panning across like that,
or you can set different positions.
So, say we want to start it here.
We'll put that as pose two
and then we'll pan it across to the left
and set that as pose one.
And now when we press pose two
it'll just automate the motion and move across
to the second position. Now, this is also where
you want to keep in mind your speed like I was saying earlier.
There's a speed toggle and also a ramping toggle
to choose how smooth it's going to start and end.
Now the point of a pan is to demonstrate the breadth
of the set or the environment,
or to show something that was previously unseen.
And small pans of even only a few centimetres
can help make a shot feel more dynamic. And the same is true
for tilting, which is going to be our second
fundamental camera movement.
Now, I'm going to swap out the HeadONE for something bigger
to demonstrate the tilting, but you can still
use the HeadONE for tilting, you would just use it this way
instead of this way, and you can actually get two of these
and use them in conjunction with a bracket that edelkrone makes
that you would have a pan and tilt head.
But for panning and tilting together, I like to use
the HeadPLUS, mainly because it's scarier looking.
[light effervescent music]
So, for tilting, all the same principles apply; weight
and resistance will still reduce unwanted shakes, it's still
meant to expand a scene, or make it feel more dynamic,
or to track a subject, just along a different axis,
and you still have to watch your speed when doing it.
when using the HeadPLUS you operate it in the same way
with the app, but now you can control both movements,
the tilt and the pan at the same time.
And this is one area where motion hardware really shines.
Typically when you use a handheld panning or tilt head
you'll find that when you try to do both movements
at the same time, like, say, at a 45° angle,
that often it ends up kind of having a stair effect
where you tilt, then pan, tilt, then pan, and it can
be quite difficult to master to do that by hand
unless you're really practised with your head.
But with the HeadPLUS I can just use the key framing
to choose a start point at the top left
and then an endpoint in the bottom right
and then have a snack while making movie magic.
♪
Now, you'll notice that this rig is sitting on a slider.
This is the SliderPLUS PRO from edelkrone, and we're going
to use it to demonstrate our next two camera movements.
And this is also when things are going to get a little pedantic.
When you move a camera from side to side
you'll hear a lot of different terms for it.
You'll hear "slide," in this case, which makes sense because
we're using a slider, but it doesn't really give
any sense of direction. You'll even hear pan occasionally,
which is just wrong and confusing. Make sure that
you're only using pan to describe
that horizontal sweeping movement
that takes place at the camera's centre column,
You can't pan up or down,
and you can't pan forward or backwards.
You can only pan left and right and panning does not
require the camera's position to change. And you'll also hear
this kind of movement called tracking. Now there's quite
a bit of debate here because some people believe that
it's called tracking because often this type of movement
is done when you lay out rails in a track like a railroad
and you move the camera along that track, thus tracking.
But other people believe it's called tracking
because you're actually tracing and following a subject
through the frame, thus actually literally tracking the subject.
So, it's a tracking shot.
But in both cases, it's not actually specific to
the direction. Often tracking has to be done perpendicularly,
but because tracking or "following" shots
can be done handheld, and they can be done all over the place,
then they don't really indicate left or right.
So, the correct term for this movement,
not that tracking is wrong, but where you can't really get
it mistaken with anything else is trucking, or truck.
If you truck the camera left, or truck the camera right,
then the camera's movement is clear that the entire camera
setup is going to shift its position to the left
or to the right. Now we can use the app in the same way
for this movement because I have edelkrone's
Slide Module V2 hooked up to the slider
Which will motor drive the belt and automate the movement.
So, what we really have to do is just move it to the left.
Now, I'm going to tilt the camera down-- remember tilting
isn't part of this motion, but I'm just choosing how I want
the camera angle to take place from the get-go.
Then I'm going to set this as pose one.
And then I'm going to move down a little bit to the right.
And set this as pose two. Now, when I tap pose one,
the camera will truck to the left.
This type of shot has a similar utility to a pan
in that you are expanding the breadth of the scene,
but it has the advantage of remaining
parallel with the subject to give the illusion
that you are travelling alongside. Where with a pan
the subject would be getting further and further away
and you'd only be changing the angle of the camera.
Now if you change this direction of movement from left and right
to forward and backward, we'd have our fourth camera movement,
the dolly, named because usually the camera
and the tripod are placed on a dolly that can be used
to move toward and away from the subject.
It's important to note, however,
that if your subject stays stationary
and you're not following them
then this is going to require you to change focus
because your distance from the subject
is going to change as you dolly in and out.
And this is another area where motion control hardware
is super handy as a solo shooter because as a solo shooter
you obviously don't have a focus puller.
So, let the robots pull the focus for you. In this case
I'm using the optional Focus Module for the HeadPLUS
which assigns focus position key frames alongside
the movement key frames using the app the exact same way.
So, let's move the camera forward.
We're dollying in towards this drill up here
and we'll position the tilt and pan to where we like it,
and set the focus where we like it as well, and then we'll pull
the camera back, which is dollying out
or dollying rearward or backward,
and we'll line the shot back up.
And again, we'll set the focus to...
make sure that it's reasonably sharp.
I'm not trying that hard here.
And we'll set that as pose one.
So, now we have both of our poses
and then just like we did before you just tap the pose
and everything's going to be done at the same time now.
It's going to move forward If there's any panning
and tilting that needs to be adjusted
it's going to do that and it's also going to change
the focus as we get closer to the drill.
Now, you can combine a truck and a dolly
for a compound angular movement, but these usually require
a dance floor, which is an industry term
for a smoothed out floor surface that allows you to truck
and dolly your camera in whatever angles are necessary.
now, we can create a version of this on a smaller scale
by positioning our slider on an angle and then using
the slider motor as well as the panning control
to create, sort of, a compound shot.
♪
It's an interesting shot because it covers
two kinds of distance. The depth of the frame
and the width, while potentially revealing something about
the subject or its position in that environment. And combining
panning with trucking is how you would create
that parallax effect, but we'll talk more about parallax
in another video.
The fifth fundamental camera movement is the roll
which involves changing the levelling of your camera.
Now, this one's definitely a lot less popular
than the other ones but it has gained some traction recently
with handheld gimbals offering the Inception mode,
which basically continually rolls your camera.
And it has been in some major productions
like Stranger Things. And of course Christopher Nolan movies.
However, there is another more common
use of the roll and that's to create a Dutch Angle.
Now the rolling part of this movement isn't so pronounced
but you just angle the horizon a little differently to create
a head tilt effect, which is used to create
a sense of discomfort or confusion.
And you can also combine this with the other camera movements
that we talked about. Now with the HeadPLUS I'm not so sure
that this is advised, but because this whole
HeadPLUS unit can lay flat for packing it up,
you can actually use it to cant the camera
a little bit and get that roll effect.
And thus create a Dutch Angle. Now we obviously
aren't going to be able to motorize this rolling action.
Again, you're going to want to use a handheld gimbal for that,
but we can use it to hold that Dutch Angle position
so that we can then use the other movements
of the system in order to
create a disorienting shot.
When you go for this kind of shot
I recommend that you use some parallel lines
in the background so that you have something to indicate
to the viewer that they are canted a little bit to the side.
Again I'm not so sure that it's advised to use the HeadPLUS
on this kind of angle, but it works.
Our sixth and final fundamental movement
is the pedestal, or more commonly known as booming
and this is where the camera moves up and down.
It's called pedestal because television cameras are huge
and were often attached to a physical pedestal
which would have a pneumatic lifting device
to raise and lower the camera.
But on movie sets this work is done by cranes and jibs,
which is why it's usually called booming instead.
You can boom the camera up and down and sometimes combine it
with tilting in order to keep the subject in the frame.
Now, I can't really do this on the edelkrone system
because I don't have any motors powerful enough
to lift the rig vertically, but I do have sort of
an improvised way of doing this with a slider.
♪
If we position the slider vertically and then use a head
with separate tilt and pan segments,
like the new edelkrone FlexTILT Head 2,
we can then position our camera normally
and slide it up and down.
♪
Now, we have to do this by hand, but we can still somewhat
effectively simulate a pedestal or boom movement,
but you might find you get smoother results
to lower it rather than lift it
and then reverse the footage in post.
Alright, so that's it for camera movements, but there are
two lens movements that I wanted to talk about
that I alluded to earlier in the video. The first one
we already kind of covered a little bit
and that's racking focus. When we dollied in and out
and when we also tracked some of the movement, we had to change
our focus throughout the shot, but we can also use
racking focus to give the illusion of a camera movement,
even though the camera remains stationary.
If you focus on something up close and then slowly rack focus
through the frame to something in the background
it kind of gives the illusion
that you're moving the viewer through
the frame and deeper into the shot.
The other lens movement is zoom.
Now this one's pretty obvious on what it is
and is definitely one of the most widely used tools.
It has a similar effect to the dolly in the sense
that you get closer to your subject,
but in this case the camera stays stationary.
But if you combine all three of those things; the rack focus,
the zoom, and the dolly, then you can create
the famous Dolly Zoom, where you zoom
in the opposite direction of your dolly
and rack focus if necessary.
Now, this is difficult to do without autofocus
as a single shooter because there's just
too many things to turn at once,
but I was able to do it on the HeadPLUS by hacking
the focus module a little bit. Instead of attaching
the ring to the focus ring on my camera
I attached it to the zoom ring.
So, now I can use the focus module to zoom
in and out at a controlled and automated process.
But I have to rely on the camera's autofocus
to ensure that the shot stays in focus during that.
And it also helps if you stop down the camera
a little bit to give you a deeper depth of field.
That way you don't have to rely on the autofocus as much.
♪
Now, I did all this with the HeadPLUS and slider combo
but edelkrone does have specific products
for that purpose, including a full line of dolly devices.
But despite that, I do like the versatility
of their products, like this HeadONE, which I mentioned
I'll be giving away to a commenter on this video.
But you can use this one device to pan, tilt,
and even do time lapses,
which is all controlled in the app.
And even if your camera doesn't have an intervalometer,
there's a shutter release connection port here
that you can use to connect to your camera,
which will activate the shutter
based on the interval that you set in the app.
So, there's really nothing stopping you
from creating time-lapses
regardless of what camera you have. And what's great
is you don't even need to monitor it or keep
the app running. In fact, you can walk away and even
turn off your phone and the time lapse will keep going
until the sequence is complete. And this is doubly handy
if you want to control two different systems at once.
For instance with the HeadONE.
There's this product Turntable Kit that you can get,
which I have here, and this allows you to spin
products, whatever you want obviously using the HeadONE.
And basically you just use the HeadONE
upside down because on the bottom
there's little grips. And then it'll do the same pan motion.
But this time it'll spin it like a Lazy Susan.
♪
And if you tap both position one and position two
at the same time, it will continue to move back and forth
until you tell it to stop and since it can also
use Sony NP-F batteries in addition to mains power
You'll be able to continue this motion
for a very long time
giving you plenty of time to go get another snack.
♪
But that's gonna be it for me, I hope you found this video
helpful or at least entertaining and if you did make sure
you leave it the old thumbs up and consider subscribing
if you haven't already, but if you did not find
this video helpful or entertaining,
feel free to hit the dislike button twice.
Alright... I'm done.
♪