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Ron

Arfa Daily wrote:
"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Arfa Daily wrote:
Does anyone know where in the world the school of half-arsed camerawork
and editing techniques is ? Must be a big place, as it seems that
networks won't take on anyone any more, who hasn't graduated from it
... :-)
It was once thought that any camera work or editing which grabbed your
attention would distract from the story. But nowadays story seems often
less important than the action.
I'm of a generation brought up on radio drama - and still enjoy it.
Luckily in the UK there's still a fair bit. Both film and TV have to work
hard to improve on your own imagination. ;-)

--
*Why is the word abbreviation so long?

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

There's a lot of camera and editing techniques employed now, which I think
are the result of arty-farty thinking, and often at least incongruous in a
particular production, if not downright inappropriate. One that seems to
have come in recently, is where a show like for instance "The Hotel
Inspector", has a presenter who needs to present some parts direct to
camera. They used to look at the camera, and the good ones could get the
right 'expression' into their eyes to 'engage' the viewer. You actually felt
like they were talking to you alone. Now, they seem to talk to some unknown
person standing 10 feet behind the camerman's right shoulder. This gives
their eyes a strange 'disconnected' look, and it feels sort of rude of them
to appear to be talking to someone else rather than me.

I also hate the waggling camera shots, the rapid zooms and de-zooms that
leave the focus lagging a couple of seconds behind, and the way that cookery
programmes are shot now, with the camera zooming in on a single tomato seed
in the mixing bowl, before a high speed de-zoom to some arbitrary ingredient
pile or implement, followed by another high speed and defocussed zoom to the
spot on the end of the presenter's nose, followed by a rapid drop back into
the mixing bowl. WTF are they trying to show ? How is that sort of crap
appropriate to that type of programme ?

And now that "The Bill" has got a 9 o'clock slot, they've changed the
shooting medium to something that looks altogether 'wrong', changed the way
it's lit, presumably to try to give it some kind of dark edginess, added the
most inappropriate incidental music, and changed the characters into moody
hard-men. That show had a good format before, and wasn't suffering falling
ratings, so why try to fix what ain't broke ?

And it never starts on time ... :-)

Arfa

Have you noticed that they've just discovered tilt shifting so that
almost every cop show you watch these days has long shots that look like
lego models and usually quite out of context - they do it cos they can.

Ron