HOW MOVING SHOTS REVEAL STORY

CREATE TENSION, AND (SO. MUCH.) MORE

let’s make some choices!

From I May Destroy You to Wynonna Earp, network procedurals to prestige cable dramas, limited run series and even talk shows (hello, Patriot Act), modern TV likes to keep the camera moving.

Sometimes it’s got specific intent, sometimes it’s a cheap way to up production value, sometimes the reason seems unclear. So: when and how is it used best?

WHAT DOES ‘MOVING’ DO?

Movement can reveal, demonstrate, and forward plot, character, theme, and story. Soooooo basically anything and everything, depending how it’s used!

Movement can cover more (literal) ground to establish a sense of place when first seeing a world or location; continue motion from an establishing shot; be impressive in technical and logistical aspects like the iconic Wings shot.

It can elicit Big Feels by sweeping across a vista; surprise the viewer by moving behind (or through!) a wall; demonstrate character status such as the opening shot of Volver indicating characters stuck in their past.

It can contribute to tension and jump scares, or lull viewers along. Gilmore Girls often uses it to add to conversations’ freewheeling pace, driving the audience as frenetically as everything else in the Lorelais’s lives.

Certain shows use movement more specifically; Psych and Legends of Tomorrow closely mimic shots and style of shows they’re homaging, and more loosely, Person of Interest’s camera moves are often determined by the genre they’re riffing on.

ADVANTAGES AND DRAWBACKS

Not every camera move needs A Defining Purpose — it can fun and beautiful in its own right, and sometimes we just want to see a cool set while a be-suit-ed character delivers exposition. So why wouldn’t you use it?!

Well, when used poorly, movement can undercut story or characters, distract from acting or cinematography, or make the viewer seasick.

Unceasing movement can be an attempt to give the audience an impression something is happening! even when story or character are stagnant; a cheat, sure, sometimes even an effective one.

Movement can easily disorient and confuse the audience as to where characters are in relation to each other — a bad thing if not done purposely and carefully.

It’s also more complicated — and thus gives more room for mistakes, retakes, and spending more time and money than you may have.

PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS

When everything is literally moving, it may feel as though the narrative is driving forward. But, many individual moments could be better served if the camera sat and observed the characters in frame. Consider if you can use smaller moves to achieve your purpose, and when they’re better options than a bigger, more ‘impressive’ move.

Of course, being still requires time to craft edit and performance, and time is also money, and money is something network producers would often rather put towards pyrotechnics or something which looks cool in a 15 second ad spot.

More cuts in the edit is – very generally speaking – less good for showcasing intricate blocking, letting performance breathe, or flowing smoothly through a scene, but better for the ability to deliver your show at exactly the 42:15 the network demands. Shooting in constantly moving shots don’t mean you can’t cut — see the section on Russian Doll‘s chopped-up tracking shot below — but it does make it much more difficult to have a smooth edit.

For example, when you shoot conversations in a smooth shot-reverse-shot, you can trim a sentence, you can choose where to overlap dialogue or cut out or add ‘dead air.’ If the camera is always moving — whether in a 360, or a tracking shot of any size — you need to get the conversation in one take where all the actors nail their marks and deliver their lines in a smooth flowing banter and the crew is able to move equipment perfectly and there isn’t a plane overhead right as the camera is close on our hero delivering her climactic line and hahahaha who are we kidding, it often means often you need to cut into that shot and/or suffer some imperfections and/or dub and/or ADR in post to let the conversation flow and make sense.

If you want more about that, I use the Legion pilot to examine tracking-shots-as-narrative over on Shot Zero, including this one:

TECHNICAL STUFF

That we (consciously or otherwise) assume a moving frame is necessarily fancier than a still frame is at least partly holdover from the days when only higher-budget films could afford the extra equipment and setup time required for more than a simple pan.

The West Wing look (established by legend Thomas Schlamme) brought steadicam / moving camera into network favour in the early oughts. Because network shows still lean towards tight schedules and small budgets, that led to shows trying to emulate The West Wing’s look & feel without the same time and money to thoroughly motivate, choreograph, and rehearse complex movements and long takes. The ‘cheaper & faster’ solution devolved to: handhold / steadicam everything, including simply-blocked shots which before may have used anything from sticks (tripod) to tracking dollies.

Even today, moving is only ‘cheaper and more expedient’ when handheld. Laying long dolly tracks, putting a camera on a jib and meticulously planning the movements, blocking and lighting long walk-and-talks, etc. takes more time and effort and money than a still shot.

Cheaper and faster has its tradeoffs. Handheld/steadicam is often more scattered and broadly lit to allow for ‘freedom’ of movement’**, all which means more shakiness and less likelihood you catch the perfect moment with the actor both in focus and good lighting.

A good handheld shot is trickier than a good still one, not just in equipment and time, but because it adds another camera operator, focus puller, and one-to-several grips to the complicated dance the actors perform.

Not all shots SHOULD move; it doesn’t always serve story or character or feel of a scene, and can detract from performances — whether by interfering with actors on set, or detracting from the audience’s ability to take in and engage with their performance on screen.

Plus, defaulting to constant movement can rob important moving shots of their power through movement fatigue. Shows such as The Americans which use movement more sparingly or intentionally prove it’s best not only in smaller doses, but in more particular ways. When movement is used constantly, it starts to become too familiar, breeding contempt or worse: boredom.

But let’s say you have the money, the gear, the time, the prowess, and movement serves your story. How many ways can you move . . .

VARIATIONS

Combinations of movement are near endless!

Let’s talk four particular camera moves: a oner; a small move within many other cuts; a few bigger moves cut together; and Russian Doll (yep, its own subsection).

The Oner

A continuous long shot, often tracking as well as some or all of panning, tilting, and racking focus, a oner can is a way of immersing audience in a world, a moment, a character’s state of mind, and more.

You could cover the two scenes below many ways using standard cuts, but a oner is ideally effective for two reasons. Watch the scenes considering how 1. the movement give us a sense of identification with the hero (PoI) or voyeurism (TXF) 2. moving allows our train of thought to run uninterrupted, driving our suspense and questioning.

Because the moves are unbroken, so is the tension.

This shot from 4.13 “M.I.A.” is reminiscent of one of Laura‘s reveals.

I did a longer breakdown on ShotZero, but in summary: aesthetically pleasing, tension building, and contrasts with the short-sharp-fight sequence which follows.

It’s similar in movement to The X-Files 1.03 “Squeeze” shot, which upends our expectations a different way.

The shot is voyeuristic: coming from behind a wall to peep on Scully as she begins a bath; moving towards her the way horror movies often insinuate a stalker POV. It becomes clear from how close the camera/audience get Scully would see if the camera were actually an intruder, but the feeling of being watched remains as we move from wide to a closeup of Scully’s hands opening a bottle . . . PLOP! She and we are startled by the reveal.

Small Moves Within Cuts

Better Call Saul knows exactly when, why, and how it’s using its camera, from a beautiful montage to a macro lens showing ants eating ice cream. Episode 03.02 “Witness” cold opens with a combination of still shots, close-ups, and camera moves following an object/character in motion.

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Chuck makes tea, checks locks, and peers out windows. We’ve been in his house before, we see he is nervous but don’t know why, the tension is building as the scene cuts to a wide which ever so slowly begins to move. With this move it reveals information, as at 01:03 the camera moves to a place where we can see in the mirror what Chuck has known all along: a man is sitting in his house.

With the right music, this might be played for a jump scare, instead we have just enough time to wonder if this stranger is intruder or enemy or friend before Chuck enters.

Because of the framing, for a moment we can’t tell whether Chuck sees the man, the slow creep of the camera heightening tension as Chuck’s shadow falls over the mirror before he becomes reflected in it, movement first creating then breaking our suspense at whether Chuck knows the man is there.

Bigger Moves Cut Together

Sometimes you break scenes into multiple long shots, which don’t carry quite the same effect, but can sustain themselves for much longer.

The West Wing 2.01 “In the Shadow of Two Gunmen” contains chaos, scale, and minimal cuts, all clearly meticulously planned.

The camera isn’t jerky, but carries us with the action in movements much more chaotic than the show’s usual walk and talks; another example of using contrast to usual form — IE exception to the rule — in your favour.

Often you’ll face logistical and not just creative reasons for breaking big tracking shots up — eg you’re shooting two or three locations pretending it’s all the same space, lower budgets and/or bigger scenes, particularly on small-screen shows.

Categories of cable vs network, prestige vs pedestrian, highbudget vs lowbrow, are becoming even more outdated, and techniques which used to be exclusive to one category are crossing over to YouTube, TikTok, etc. I wish we’d come up with better ways of talking about distinctions between art instead of boxing it up with genre labels and outdated terms . . . but this is not the place for that, so!

Where does Russian Doll, a half-hour 8 episode sci-fi where the final two episodes play almost as one continuous thought, fit?

It gets its own category.

RUSSIAN DOLL

Russian Doll’s many tracking shots change and progress through the series, particularly at Nadia’s ‘restarts’. Some are unbroken, others choppy, and all lead us to the realisation this is a show-as-metaphor-for-video-game-as-metaphor-for-life (your particular order of those categories may vary). As producer Steph Westwood – who also has experience in the game industry – pointed out: “The way the tracking shots let her get away, and then catch up to her, it’s so elegant and dynamic.”

Like video games, this sometimes breaks the shot mid-track to switch ‘angles’ as Nadia moves, angles often show us new facets of the world we’ve not seen, or which have changed since our last visit, from the door design, to the party being populated (or not), etc.

Don’t let the editing fool you: chopping up a tracking shot to where it still feels smooth and coherent and keeps you grounded in the space can be harder than creating one smooth shot (eg heeeella hard).

Russian Doll contains a myriad of camera movements: to heighten comedic effect when characters tumble over cars or down stairwells; to show similarities/differences between characters and their situations by using similar/different movements in mirrored scenarios; to reveal things behind walls or in suitcases, particularly when things have changed from ‘life to life,’ and more.

Crucially, Russian Doll doesn’t overuse movement — for example many of Nadia’s most important conversations with her mother, godmother, neighbourhood rabbi, etc. are still, the better to let us concentrate on their emotional interactions.

FINAL NOTES

Being able to execute moving shots is a massive team effort, and the final effect can be wildly rewarding . . . but directing is hard and full of compromises. Every time you film a loooooong moving shot on network TV, chances rise you’ll have to sacrifice elsewhere (and/or the shot may still get chopped up in post!)

But if you go in knowing exactly what you want to accomplish with the shot – why you’re using a particular motion or starting behind a particular object, how it tells a character’s mindset, what emotions it should evoke in the audience, what is going to make jaws drop, what it’s going to reveal in fluid or seemingly haphazard ways – and if you can communicate that to everyone on your team, you’ll be halfway there.

Know when to move and when to sit in the stillness.

Stray Observations

– *Many TV sets now have tracks or other framework built in, meaning you can do something like a sweeping 180 without too much trouble. But really sexy moving setups in exteriors or one-off locations are still mostly the territory of feature films.

– **It’s the same principle / reason action-based reality TV such as Masterchef and Survivor are so bright; to allow the camera to jump anywhere, at any time.

– In The X-Files clip you can see Gillian pause for pretend-struggle with her bath perfume while waiting for the out-of-frame props-person to drop the goo juuuuuuust right. That’s filmmaking! You get a couple runs at it – hell, sometimes just one, like Sidney Lumet and that famous Orient Express leaving the station – then take the best take and move on.

– Legends of Tomorrow took the Arrowverse model of ‘starting a scene by moving out from behind an object,’ then perfected it to occasionally make dirty visual jokes.

– Another of my favourites, but more about the tracking and a meta show-off-y-ness of film itself than micro-moves or reveals until the last cut, is the Day for Night opener. The wonderful Call My Agent often employs shots like this.

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