Using a Crane: Educating your Audience on Geography & the Art of Discovery

This week we go into another motion tool of storytelling, THE CRANE. This device has been around for decades. Allan Dwan has been credited with the first dolly shot and the first crane shot. He devised a system for D.W. Griffith on Intolerance (1916).
Allan Dwan
Allan Dwan

I have used cranes that I ride, like the Apollo and the Zeus from Chapman, as well as ones that are operated remotely. Bob Richardson, ASC actually prefers to ride his crane and has done so for many years. He loves being one with the camera, as well as the feel of the fixed arm.

Bob Richardson, ASC on Inglourious Basterds
Bob Richardson, ASC on Inglourious Basterds

Apollo
                                                       Apollo


Zeus
                                                                                   Zeus


“Fixed arm vs. Telescopic arm”

The arsenal of cranes can be overwhelming at times. Every month in American Cinematographer, there is a new crane that goes 50’, no 80’, no now 100’ and it is motion controlled, repeatable. So many options! Another one can go underwater. It’s the HydroCrane, daunting to navigate.
FIXED: I remember when the Louma crane first came out.


 Louma
                                                                        Louma

It was basically a 20’ aluminum tube that had a remote head at the end that could take the full weight of a film camera and a zoom lens. WOW! This was the go to device on music videos in the late 80’s and early nineties. I was flinging it all around. Then one day a 21’ Technocrane showed up on a music video I was Key Gripping and I knew this would change the way we used the crane.

 Techno 21'
                                                             Techno 21′

If the DSLR was a game changer, then the Technocrane was a crane changer. What made it so unique? Up to this point, the crane arm was fixed, meaning it did not move in and out. To accomplish this, you had to put your crane base on track, then have your dolly grip move the base as you boom up or down to get compound moves. What is a compound move? It is a move that requires the camera to boom up or down, swing left or right and dolly in and out. Let’s say you start directly overhead and you want to boom down to a close up of an actor and keep him or her in the center of the frame. You will need to have your fixed arm on track like I described and push to the end of its track. When you boom down, you will have to track back to take the arc out of the straight arm, then push in again to land on the close up. There are many fixed arm cranes. Kessler makes the V3 with a Revolution head that I used recently on Need for Speed for our splinter unit. Benefits of this crane were the price and that you could carry it up stairs and narrow hallways because it is so light and compact.
  Kessler Revolution Head
                           Kessler Revolution Head

V3 Crane
                                     V3 Crane

 Kessler on Need For Speed
                                                        Kessler on Need For Speed


The Jimmy Jib is another one that I use when we cannot afford a Techno or Giraffe.
 Jimmy Jib 
                                           Jimmy Jib

I always like the Giraffe. It looks archaic, but it got the job done on The Rat Pack, The Skulls and Drumline.

 Giraffe
                                                               Giraffe

Giraffe with remote head
                                                       Giraffe with remote head

 Lenny Arm II Plus and Lenny Arm III
                                                  Lenny Arm II Plus and Lenny Arm III


Fischer 23
                                                                        Fischer 23


Fischer 23 build out chart
                                            Fischer 23 build out chart

 Pegasus
                                              Pegasus

Pegasus
                                             Pegasus

Fixed arm movement
These are all fixed crane moves on crane track.



TELESCOPIC: A telescopic arm gives you ultimate freedom to dream. You set the base in one location and you use the telescopic feature of the crane to remove the arc that I talked about above as well as the freedom to try many more moves that would be limited on a fixed arm crane.
I love the 50’ Technocrane the most. Why? Well, it seems to be the perfect length to get your moves to tell the story without having to lay track, which takes time. I have only laid track with the 50’ Techno four times in my career.
 Techno 15'
                                                             Techno 15′

 Techno 22'
                                                                              Techno 22′

Techno 30'
                                                            Techno 30′

Techno 50'
                                                                  Techno 50′


Techno 100'
                                                                  Techno 100′


Why the 40’ Movie Bird?

 MovieBird 45'
                                                                    MovieBird 45′

The reason for this beauty is that it is half the weight of a 50’ and one third of the width. This is incredibly important on boats, locations that have weight and space restrictions, etc. You get the same telescopic arm abilities as the Techno, just in a smaller package.


Why the Scorpio Crane?
Scorpio Crane 30/37
                                                       Scorpio Crane 30/37
Scorpio Diagram

                                                                    Scorpio Diagram
This crane is the mother of all cranes. The creators really took the best assets of both the Movie Bird and the 50’ Technocrane and added some key features to take the guess work out of creating complex compound moves. It has the ability to program soft stops as well as taking the arc out of a move without relying on your operator to do it. A crane can be an amazing tool, but WHY do you use a crane is probably a better question to ask. RIGHT??


“Geography, Geography, Geography”

I go to so many movies and I find that I have no idea where characters are in a scene. The coverage is so tight that you lose the sense of space. A good cinematographer educates an audience on the space in which the characters live, their possible peril, their sanctuary, their happiness, their sadness, and the emotions that they are feeling. Using a crane can do just that. The fundamentals of moviemaking. Wide shot, medium shot, close up. Simple, right? It is important not to lose sight of these core building blocks.
Let’s take this shot from Terminator Salvation. We wanted to educate the audience on the setting, the tone, the peril, the horror of what these innocent people are about to witness, experience. What kind of shot would help deliver these emotions? How about one that views the peril of people on the ground who are being pushed by this wall with spikes and bright lights, and then we push past their faces in fear and boom up? Not only to see their transporter but another one landing in the distance. How does this make you feel? Small and insignificant. What else does this simple move achieve? It shows scope, that these machines are ruthless, controlling and winning this war. What else does it tell you? It shows the space that the poor humans are now in, and this is one scary place. It shows that this group is just one of a 100 ships that are entering this huge processing facility.
This is all done with one simple push and boom up. See how powerful the WHY is? I know that many of you want to go out, get your hands on a camera and all this cool stuff, and create. But it is so important to understand the theory about storytelling. THE WHY. I know that people throw this word around like it is hot dogs and peanuts at a baseball game, but understand why you are doing it first. How it can take your actors and your story that much higher is the power and the art of cinematography. Knowing that you are not just doing a crane move because it looks cool, but that it is specifically there to help the audience feel the emotions of your characters, is paramount.

“The Art of Discovery” Let’s take two more crane shots from Terminator. We talked about geography and educating the audience on where our characters are, but you can also use a crane to discover and build a feeling. How do you educate an audience that the world has just been blown up by a nuclear holocaust? Slowly and methodically. In the first crane shot, we see the expanse of a destroyed Los Angeles in the distance while our hero-in-the-making works on a Jeep to get out of Dodge. Soon after we use a boom down and sweep across a 7 Eleven sign which has a DNA double helix spray painted on it. What could that mean? Is it the sign of the Resistance? But the sign is destroyed. We continue to discover that the gas island is caved in, demolished, abandoned, desolate. What are the emotions of the characters? They are on the run, chased by machines, on edge. I employ handheld camera as well as crane to make you all in the audience nervous, just like they are. We need to see that no matter how far they drive, the same destruction they left in LA is worldwide; it is everywhere. This simple move shows destruction; it cements that they are alone. Where is everybody? How could we (humans) have let the machines take over?
“Keep the Emotions Coming” On We Are Marshall, I wanted to use a crane boom up to evoke the emotions of absolute horror and loss. We follow our teammates who were on the injured, reserve list and were not able to fly with their football team. They hear about the crash, hop in a truck, travel to the site, run to the hillside, slip, fall in the mud on a rainy, foggy night to discover that their teammates, coaches and supporters have all perished in a tragic plane crash. We start with the emotions on their faces after this journey from town to the countryside. They look in horror, fire reflecting on their faces. We fly with the crane up and over their backs to reveal the devastation. We wanted to make sure that the tail section was still evident and that the fire was everywhere. I feel this gave the scene so much more emotional punch because you see that it is a plane, you see windows, and fire. You quickly put two and two together that no one survived. They are all dead!! Sons, daughters, fathers and mothers.

These crane moves I have described are not able to do all of this emotional heavy lifting by themselves, but with the help of great actors, a good story and additional coverage that puts you there, they can give you scope, geography and the sense of discovery. How do you like to use different cranes on your shoots?

By Shane Hurlbut, ASC
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Danny Boyle’s 15 Golden Rules of Moviemaking by Danny Boyle


danny-boyle-camera-2

1. A DIRECTOR MUST BE A PEOPLE PERSON • Ninety-five percent of your job is handling personnel. People who’ve never done it imagine that it’s some act, like painting a Picasso from a blank canvas, but it’s not like that. Directing is mostly about handling people’s egos, vulnerabilities and moods. It’s all about trying to bring everybody to a boil at the right moment. You’ve got to make sure everyone is in the same film. It sounds stupidly simple, like ‘Of course they’re in the same film!’ But you see films all the time where people are clearly not in the same film together.
2. HIRE TALENTED PEOPLE • Your main job as a director is to hire talented people and get the space right for them to work in. I have a lot of respect for actors when they’re performing, and I expect people to behave. I don’t want to see people reading newspapers behind the camera or whispering or anything like that.
3. LEARN TO TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS • Ideally, you make a film up as you go along. I don’t mean that you’re irresponsible and you’ve literally got no idea, but the ideal is that you’ve covered everything—every angle—so that you’re free to do it any of those ways. Even on low-budget films, you have financial responsibilities. Should you fuck it up, you can still fall back on one of those ways of doing it. You’ve got Plan A to go back to, even though you should always make it with Plan B if you can. That way keeps it fresh for the actors, and for you.
4. FILM HAPPENS IN THE MOMENT • What’s extraordinary about film is that you make it on the day, and then it’s like that forever more. On that day, the actor may have broken up with his wife the night before, so he’s inevitably going to read a scene differently. He’s going to be a different person.
I come from theater, which is live and changes every night. I thought film was going to be the opposite of that, but it’s not. It changes every time you watch it: Different audiences, different places, different moods that you’re in. The thing is logically fixed, but it still changes all the time. You have to get your head around that.
5. IF YOUR LAST FILM WAS A SMASH HIT, DON’T PANIC • I had an obsession with the story of 127 Hours, which pre-dated Slumdog Millionaire. But I know—because I’m not an idiot—that the only reason [the studio] allowed us to make it was because Slumdog made buckets of money for them and they felt an obligation of sorts. Not an obligation to let me do whatever I want, but you kind of get a free go on the merry-go-round.
6. DON’T BE AFRAID TO TELL STORIES ABOUT OTHER CULTURES • You can’t just hijack a culture for your story, but you can benefit from it. If you go into it with the right attitude, you can learn a lot about yourself, as well as about the potential of film in other cultures, which is something we tried to do with Slumdog Millionaire… Most films are still made in America, about Americans, and that’s fine. But things are changing and I think Slumdog was evidence of that. There will be more evidence as we go on.
7. USE YOUR POWER FOR GOOD • You have so much power as director that if you’re any good at all, you should be able to use that to the benefit of everyone. You have so much power to shape the movie the way you want it that, if you’re on form and you’ve done your prep right and you’re ready, you should be able to make a decent job of it with the other people.
8. DON’T HAVE AN EGO • Your working process—the way you treat people, your belief in people—will ultimately be reflected in the product itself. The means of production are just as important as what you produce. Not everyone believes that, but I do. I won’t stand for anyone being treated badly by anyone. I don’t like anyone shouting or abusing people or anything like that. You see people sometimes who are waiting for you to be like that, because they’ve had an experience like that in the past, but I’m not a believer in that. The texture of a film is affected very much by the honor with which you make it.
9. MAKE THE TEST SCREENING PROCESS WORK FOR YOU • Test screenings are tough. It makes you nervous, exposing the film, but they’re very important and I’ve learned a great deal from using them. Not so much from the whole process of cards and the discussions afterwards, but the live experience of sitting in an auditorium with an audience that doesn’t know much about the story you’re going to tell them—I find that so valuable. I’ve learned not so much to like it, but to value how important it is. I think you have to, really.
10. COME TO THE SET WITH A LOOK BOOK • I always have a bible of photographs, images by which I illustrate a film. I don’t mean strict storyboards, I just mean for inspiration for scenes, for images, for ideas, for characters, for costumes, even for props. These images can come from anywhere. They can come from obvious places like great photographers, or they can come from magazine advertisements—anywhere, really. I compile them into a book and I always have it with me and I show it to the actors, the crew, everybody!
11. EVEN PERFECT FORMULAS DON’T ALWAYS WORK • As a director your job is to find the pulse of the film through the actors, which is partly linked to their talent and partly to their charisma. Charisma is a bit indefinable, thank God, or else it would be prescribed in the way that you chemically make a new painkiller. In the movies—and this leads to a lot of tragedy and heartache—you can sometimes have the most perfect formula and it still doesn’t work. That’s a reality that we are all victims of sometimes and benefit from at other times. But if you follow your own instincts and make a leap of faith, then you can at least be proud of the way you did it.
12. TAKE INSPIRATION WHERE YOU FIND IT • When we were promoting Slumdog Millionaire, we were kind of side-by-side with Darren Aronofsky, who was also with Fox Searchlight and was promoting The Wrestler. I watched it and it was really interesting; Darren just decided that he was going to follow this actor around, and it was wonderful. I thought, ‘I want to make a film like that. I want to see if I can make a film like that.’ It’s a film about one actor. It’s about the monolithic nature of film sometimes, you know? It’s about a dominant performance.
13. PUSH THE PRAM • I think you should always try to push things as far as you can, really. I call it “pushing the pram.” You know, like a stroller that you push a baby around in? I think you should always push the pram to the edge of the cliff—that’s what people go to the cinema for. This could apply to a romantic comedy; you push anything as far as it will stretch. I think that’s one of your duties as a director… You’ll only ever regret not doing that, not having pushed it. If you do your job well, you’ll be amazed at how far the audience will go with you. They’ll go a long, long way—they’ve already come a long way just to see your movie!
14. ALWAYS GIVE 100 PERCENT • You should be working at your absolute maximum, all the time. Whether you’re credited with stuff in the end doesn’t really matter. Focus on pushing yourself as much as you can. I tend not to write, but I love bouncing off of writing; I love having the writers write and then me bouncing off of it. I bounce off writers the same way I bounce off actors.
15. FIND YOUR OWN “ESQUE” • A lesson I learned from A Life Less Ordinary was about changing a tone—I’m not sure you can do that. We changed the tone to a kind of Capra-esque tone, and whenever you do anything more “esque,” you’re in trouble. That would be one of my rules: No “esques.” Don’t try to Coen-esque anything or Capra-esque anything or Tarkovsky-esque anything, because you’ll just get yourself in a lot of trouble. You have to find your own “esque” and then stick to it.
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