Bright & Dumb – Of Photographer and Videographer – There has got to be one director.
He loved my photography twice before, but chose a friend to shoot this Bar Mitzvah’s video.
Each moment’s ideal angle will tell the story best and render subjects pleasingly. But on this shoot, I was hog tied with regimented personnel on both sides. Their approach made a mockery of what video should be. NYC’s top lighting and floral designers created a breathtaking venue. Light beams dazzled. Ultra large video screens had a cutting edge wow factor. Exquisite floral detail glowed under purposeful illumination. But before guests could experience the miracles all about, the videographers ruined it!
The client promised me that the crew would work around me, and with me. But they did not. The moment it all comes together for the client is not a time to ask him to referee his vendors. The lot was cast. Into the melee was I thrust! All night I would be competing with a large tripod on one side and two other ponderous cameramen on the other. If I backed up to see more persons, sought more flattering angles or searched for other family members, I faced glaring lights that robbed me of vision and had me photographing only backsides while key players drawn to the lights the whole night would play to the videographers. The majority of the guests experienced much of the same frustration: blinded, bumped, closed off from those they came to celebrate with. All the magnificent ambience created by the other venders and coordinated by one of the most wonderful party planners I have had the pleasure of working with was over powered, overcome, buried by boorish brutish videographers who feel that they have to be on top of the subjects with 64 times the needed illumination – and lenses closed down to get ocean depth focus. How magnificent their result could have been if they stayed back, on elegantly painted ladders, from the corners of the dance floor, letting the existing light tell the story. How much better too if they had the hand held skill to walk about the crowd – alongside me, with wide open optics on cameras that allow rapid follow focus.
Using the existing light would have been beautiful. Overpowering the existing light was wrong. Shooting an event with the same approach one would use in a carefully choreographed and tightly directed studio sessions is not being more professional. It is being uncaring, insensitive, and will always fail to capture the subtle beauty in both the human and the decorative. Sustained persistent blinding up close coverage of participants affects those participants and their interaction with their guests. The client will never know what could have been and could never understand how much harder good photography became because of boorish video. Photography and video record the same people at the same time in the same place. Your event should not become a crew competition: don’t make it into a paparazzi event. It is crazy not to have a technical and artistic director: one person among the crew who is financially responsible for both the photography and video and who is technically competent and artistically sensitive to coordinate both related services. Your band will have a conductor. Imagine if each instrument was deciding when, how and what to play! Your image producers should be working together too, under a skilled and responsible conductor who coordinates lighting, angles and approach. Your happy occasion should not be a sad state of affairs.
This article originally appeared in The Jewish Star Newspaper
A video can disappoint for many reasons. You are planning a kids bar mitzvah party and hire a videographer to have a record of the few speakers. You hire a budget videographer for that simple video.
The video doesn’t show much of the boy playing with his friends during the smorgasbord. You worked hard on crafting the centerpieces. The video shows the unfinished room before banners were hung. Worse, the intricacies of all your hard work on the detailed centerpieces is invisible in wide shots. Close ups have no texture. They are flat looking.
The dancing was spirited with grandparents, rarely seen cousins, even your husband forgetting about all the preparation finally was in the moment. Your son’s expression of joy when lifted high – he truly was on top of the world right then. But the video only zoomed into his face the one moment he is off balance and the dancing shows people not as you remember them with exciting eyes and joyous smiles but rather as crowds … distant people, shown from a distance that remind you of people that you think you know.
Details that make people individuals, and their personalities are absent in this record. Sparkling eyes, determined expressions, tenacious hands and dizzying feet are not shot as close ups at just the right time and only show at seemingly arbitrary and lackluster moments.
You wait for the speeches to be better than the dancing. You recall with pride your husband’s speech, and how the audience followed his every word. Faces of close friends stands out in your mind but none of their reactions are in the video. Why?!?
Either speeches are shot theatrically like stage work, or they are shot as a press conference. Theatrical camera work involves the cameraman opinion at every moment on what is important, and how to enhance that.
News involves pointing a camera toward the podium: done! More, involves camera handling skill and decision making beyond a budget mindset. Straight forward basics get the least complaints. Drama requires altering angle, zoom, and composition to make a statement about the person speaking in real time as the dynamics of the speaker evolve. It is not for the faint of heart, or a client who expects to see the obvious, rather than insisting on the interesting. Additional cameras boost the expense, distract, and still may not get the right audience faces at the right time. An awareness of the important vs the unimportant is required. The client must accept not seeing equal footage of every similarly important guest. The viewer hears the speaker even when he is not seen on camera. Sometimes this can work really well and makes for a beautiful video. But that means finding faces reacting to the speaker’s words and delivery. A great speech helps. An entertaining speaker helps. A responsive audience helps. Even with all that, some clients expect to see the speaker most of the time and actually think wide shots show everything in a dance set, while zooms cut everything out. Factors like podium placement, having room to move but not great distance to span, and a crowd who welcome cameras rather than being irritated by one in their midst, all go to shape the approach which is chosen to make a shoot easy. Not having interesting reactions and detail actually is an industry wide reaction by many videographers to dumb down their approach and follow the path of least resistance and effort, every step of the way. Everything hardly shows anything at all. But they are afraid of missing something and budget guys are trained not to take chances, and to keep editing easy.
Short or Short Changed – Today’s Video – Part One
Heard the story of one who saved everything – even pieces of string too short to be of any use? That person we can be sure was never an editor! Editors must cut stuff out. Sometimes excising large trivialities and at other times desperately seeking just the right sliver to insert; a true editor must value content. You got to have the right footage first! Useful footage.
Call it cinema, film, a movie, or the name derived from the technology used: video has changed a lot, and will continue to change in the next few years. Let us understand the forces at play and how technology, cost, and convenience, all are affecting the scenes you will see in your event video.
There have been a lot of interesting and exciting things happening in this video revolution of the last few years. Going from VHS to DVD it turns out was not such a big deal. It did not have much effect on the image or more importantly the content. The story was still the story. It was told in the same way.
But today the story as we will remember it, could be missing much of the rest of the story…and this may not be what you might wish for later. This is the first of several articles on how video is changing along with how what we might expect it be is different today as well. The points I will be making are not so obvious. This is definitely not a situation of more merely being more. Rather I am questioning the specifics of content that is collected.
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