Originally posted by GlennG Very nice, and thanks for sharing! I thought some of the focus techniques were quite interesting - were they hard to do?
Merry Christmas!
Glenn
Thanks, Glenn.
When I started getting into DSLR video, which was like yesterday, I had the same immediate question that every other photographer turned videographer had. Which is, 'How the heck do you focus during a video?'. As photographers, we're so used to the notion of auto focus, and it came as a bit of a mind blower when I learned that nearly everything you see on the big screen or on TV is manually focused. But professional film crews also have 3-4 people manning one camera, and it is usually ones person's entire job just to pull focus. They also have a Follow Focus device, which is much smoother to control than the focus ring on a lens, and typically have their own monitor. They also do thing like use marks on the ground the correspond with premarked marks on the follow focus, so they can track moving subjects, use measuring tapes to get distances perfectly accurate, prefocus on certain objects and make corresponding marks on the follow focus and rehearse certain move before the actual take.
All that to say that focus in video is pretty tough. Most of the stuff available to traditional format film crews is by now available to the DSLR crowd, but is pretty expensive. I plan on working my way up to all of that in the near future. But in the meantime, the best thing is practice, and understanding various techniques. The reason why there are usually 3-4 people on a camera is that there is just so much going on, that doing it all at once is nearly impossible for one person. When you've got a camera getting pushed on a dolly, while making pan/tilt movement while trying to maintain focus on a moving subject, trying to do it all by yourself results in all of those operations being pretty chunky and inaccurate. It take full concentration on any one of those things to get them really smooth and perfect.
So while I'd would love to have a follow focus, external monitors, and 2 assistants (wouldn't actually want them at christmas...) and hope to have all that someday, I don't yet. So like many things in photography that are typically not as ideal as we would like them to be, it's all about creatively finding ways to make things work. If I can't do all of those movements at once by myself, then I will limit myself to as many as I can accomplish well. And there's nothing that says cameras must be moving in every way possible for every shot. Many great moments in film involve a stationary camera. I would consider this movie to have way to much camera movement, but it was mostly just a chance to practice various movements; and since it's doesn't really have a story flow to interrupt, it can get away with it.
I've found that I can right now perform any two movements together with relative success. A dolly and a pan, and pan and a tilt, and tilt and a focus shift, a dolly and a focus shift. Throw three movements in there and it stars getting pretty choppy. Throw a fourth in and it's a train wreck. So I was mostly just experimenting with 1 or 2 movements at a time to see what's cool.
Since pulling focus is hard on a 3" screen while moving the camera, you'll notice that a lot of the shots in there are pre-focused., which is something film crews do a lot. Many of the dolls push-ins, I would pushing to my final framing, then focus how I wanted, then mark where the wheels are on the dolly track, then back up the rig, and push it into that spot of focus. That is how I did the low macro shot of the four coasters with the map on them. Other times, like the shot of the book, I would start with the lens unfocused, then tilt up while sliding the focus in to place. With any of the shots, it really just comes down to practice. Somewhat practicing ahead of time and building skills, but more so, just practicing each shot. Bot of the trickier focus shots, I probably rehearsed a few times right before, and then would still do 4 or 5 takes, trying to get it perfect. And since the film is free, you can just keep trying the shot until you nail it.
There are many ways to get around the difficulty of focus in video, and I would say that it's equal parts understanding techniques, practicing techniques, and having the right/best equipment. It's the cheapest to see how far you can get with the first two, then work on the third when you hit the limit. That's my plan.