Wayne Throop wrote:
> Battle360 (and Dogfights, and some others) on the all-WWII channel,
> involve CGI recreations of famous events, often involving planes.
> I find it very distracting-and-eyeroll-provoking that they inject
> a shakycam effect when showing an aircraft flying by a fixed viewpoint
> at close range, as if the turbulence of the near miss shook the
> (nonexistant) camera.
>
> Sigh. Of course, I suppose that's not as annoying as having cars turn
> corkscrews after hitting a pebble in the road or something (though that
> latter isn't a camera effect, so I suppose it's a different category
> so annoyance factors aren't as comparable... maybe).
That's not quite what I meant in terms of "shaky-cam" -- I mean the
random and distracting motions of the camera just in the normal course
of filming. I agree that the particular effects you're talking about
are a bit silly, but at least there _would_ be turbulence in those cases
if you could somehow hover at that point. It's silly, it's done for
effect, but it's overdone.
The shaky-cam where the cameraman can't hold the camera straight just
suggests ... the cameraman is incompetent. Except he isn't, it's a
deliberate production value. _Law & Order_ was one of the first
mainstream television series to hop on the shaky-cam bandwagon, but at
least the erratic motions there are small enough in magnitude that my
brain filters it out. (Which, by the way, suggests an interesting
question: What is the point of a gimmicky production effect that the
audience has learned to ignore?) A lot of productions way overdo it; I
haven't seen _Cloverfield_ yet, but even reviewers strongly recommending
the film are warning about the vomit-induction-cam.
I like both _Dogfights_ and _Battle 360_ for what they are -- and they
_do_ do a bit of the more traditional shaky-cam to try to give a
"realistic" feel to pilots, say, searching for targets. (_Battlestar
Galactica_, for instance, does this too.) My real complaint about
_Battle 360_ wouldn't be the fake turbulence effects, it'd be the
constant stream of digital noise that they put in a surprising number of
shots -- it looks like a 3D grid of nonsense streaming past at all
times, and it's in something like half of the episode -- including
things like interviews with the actual participants. It adds nothing
and is really distracting. Even when the camera (or virtual camera) is
perfectly still.
--
Erik Max Francis && max@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
&& http://www.alcyone.com/max/
San Jose, CA, USA && 37 18 N 121 57 W && AIM, Y!M erikmaxfrancis
Principles have no real force except when one is well fed.
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