The Scene in Cinema | Week 8

In this week’s class, I learned that the choice of camera movement is not for dynamic effects on screen but for whole bunches of different intentions of the director. Different camera movements can be used for different reasons. Camera follows the character can help to increase the audiences’ sense of substitution; camera movement can be used to keep the balance of different scenes; it can be used for the intention of following up the moving objects; camera zoom in can for psychological reasons and it can also be used for highlighting the important element, etc.

However, it is not saying that a scene with a camera moving is always better than a not moving one.What needs to be noticed is that there are lots of things happening in that still frame that need to be carefully designed. I think it’s good to identify this at the beginning of the class because this is what I thought before this class, the moving one is better than the other. In the party scene of Les nuits de la pleine lune. The first time I watched it, I thought it’s pretty boring. The camera is still and there’s a bunch of people dancing in the frame for 1 minute. However, when I watched it a second time, I found the performance and movements of characters in that frame quite interesting, it actually shows the relationship between characters. Therefore, the camera movement is a tool of the director to express what they want to the audience, there are no right or wrong answers and no one is better than another. The visual interest is important to attract the audience’s attention. When the stage of the camera is still, we can always use actors’ movements to make the image richer. 

Thank you very much!