Watch These Mind Blowing Camera Tricks
3 Cool Camera Tricks to Try on Your Next Video Shoot
1) Cool Camera Tricks: Watch this video on the Art of the Whip Pan
This is a relatively simple technique that positively transforms the feel and timing of your film. It can jump through time and space, show cause-and-effect situations, and fill your scene with movement and visual energy.
We’re familiar with the pan. It’s the simple yet essential technique of rotating the camera on its axis left and right or up and down. A whip pan is like a pan, but it's fast, blurs the objects in between, and can reset the shot or scene.
You can use a whip pan in a motivated way to show what a character is seeing or where they are going. You can use the whip pan to give an energetic boost to a scene, transition between two different moments, or show the direct cause and effect of the action happening on set.
The whip pan is an excellent, simple, and exciting way to improve your camera work on a film or video shoot.
Are you a cinematographer? Check out these cinematography tricks for your next shoot.
2) The Stop and Blend
It’s hard to know whether this technique has an industry standard name. However, we’ve all seen it in motion, and it’s always a seamless way to show realistic action.
The term refers to shooting most of the action first, like someone jumping off the roof. Then, shoot the end, where they hit the ground separately, and blend the clips.
Watch this video to understand what I mean better. It teaches you how to fall to your death and not die!
The guys from Film Riot do a great job of breaking it down for us. Use the stop-and-blend technique to create a falling scene or a scene where you want to show a seamless cut.
In this example, the video shows how to have somebody fall off a roof in one shot. They achieve this by shooting the first moments of the action, either on location or, like in the video, in front of a Green Screen. Then, they shoot the second action, the fall, only the last few seconds before they hit the ground. All this without moving the camera from its spot. You can take these two clips and composite them together, making it a continuous shot.
This technique can be used to elongate a take or make things exciting. For example, you can use the stop-and-flare technique to blend all your shots into continuous motion, like in Birdman.
3) Camera movement
The best camera tricks are the ones where you know how to use the camera. Movement is essential to telling good stories, and a moving camera is an excellent tool in the visual world. Don’t be afraid to use motion purposefully.
Static shots are good when you need precise compositions in a scene or to bring attention to a character. In the video, they are referenced as tools filmmakers use to trap characters.
We’ve already discussed the whip pan, but there’s also the slow pan. This slow camera movement builds anticipation and gives a scene a sense of discovery.
Although unnatural to our abilities, the zoom can draw attention to details and enhance the dramatic effect in a scene.
A cool zoom trick is the dolly zoom. This trick uses the dolly movement with the zoom to create the vertigo effect, a technique famously used by Hitchcock. Watch the Dolly Zoom section at minute 12:50 of the video above to learn all the exciting ways to implement a Dolly Zoom on your next shoot.