I can't put up with constantly moving camera angle. Of course I am all for frequent adjustment of view/ angle but once adjusted, stop moving till the next adjustment. Edited by - heart pure on Jul 31 2007
'Fraid I don't agree. The problem is that a lot of camera people have no vision. They don't have any real connection with the viewer. They don't have anything in particular they want to show you. Good camera work (including a moving camera) can be very involving and add a whole lot to a scene. It's just that it often isn't.
1. Shots from the floor like the cameraman is only 10 inches tall. 2. Super fast push in/ pull out 3. Sidways camera ( my neck starts to hurt leaning sideways to see it) 4. Super extreme closeups during fast action 5. Cutaways to dudes face 6. ShHhhaaccKkkYy Camera 7. 360 camera rotations (You know who you are!) 8. Cameras that think they have wings and fly like a bird on a roller coaster 9............. 10............
[Link]
tritone Deactivated User
1009 Posts 4/03
Posted - Aug 3 2007 : 3:19PM
This is sooo true. The main part of your statement is "any real connection with the viewer". The best cameramen and directors were all hardcore strokers at one point. By doing this they got an idea of what turned them on and by extenstion, have a keen insight of what looks good to other porn fans within their niche.
The worst. Instant woodkiller. And for some reason, IR scenes have this disproportionately more often than other types of scenes. I also can't stand extreme close-ups and generally camerawork that distort the proportions of the girl's body (such as feet that appear to be twice the size of the rest of the legs). Edited by - eduardo911 on 8/3/2007 6:21:08 PM
[Link]
heart pure Deactivated User
66 Posts 7/07
Posted - Aug 3 2007 : 9:13PM
I love extreme closeups especially for deepthroat. Love camera-on-the-floor-shooting-up angle too. Joey Silvera does this nicely. I don't like POV angle in general. I get that from my girlfriends all the time. Edited by - heart pure on 8/3/2007 9:19:15 PM
For me the only place for a camera is right over the guys head looking at the girl POV style. That gives you a great look at her face. The worst place for a camera is filming the dude. I mean... who gives a crap. That's so 70's.
it's called WIDE ANGLE Lenses and Fish Eye Lenses and i wish the fucking camra men of the industry would brake those fuckers and go back to 8MM or 16MM lenses you know the real ones .
Diagonally parked in a parallel universe 576 Posts 5/03
Posted - Aug 4 2007 : 12:46PM
@ducatiproductions: Thank you, thank you, thank you. It's nice to know I'm not the only one bitching and moaning about these anti-stroker atrocities, but it never seems to click with the producers. mod: extraneous quote removed - see the Forum Etiquette Edited by - hardware on 8/4/2007 2:21:27 PM
[Link]
Uncle Fester Deactivated User
I rock, therefore I am! 131 Posts 6/07
Posted - Aug 4 2007 : 5:53PM
I guess it all comes down to the fact that the director thinks he is an "artiste" and is filming an oscar winning film instead of shooting smut. Personally, I think my all time favorite shot is the guy who insists on the performers having sex on the stairs and shoots the action through the railing from halfway across the room.
No I don't think that the problem is that camera man thinks he is an "artiste" he thinks he's the guy who brought the beer so his friend lets him sit in and run the camera. Too bad the guy who brought the beer has no idea how to use the camera so he just kind of whips it around while set to full wide angle so he can cop a feel now and then.
I haven't been watching porn that long, but it seems that I'm seeing more use of the 'diagonal' shot...where the camera seems tilted anywhere from 20-40 degrees or so. The idea seems to be to get more of the full body in frame while shooting CG/RCG, but for me, whatever benefit this seems to give is utterly annihilated by the disconcerting shift in my visual field. When this kind of shot happens in a POV movie or one that's filmed in widescreen, the vertigo effect is even worse. I just hate it, hate it, hate it. You can get plenty of the female's body in the shot without resorting to this. I don't want to have to be bitten by a radioactive spider or become a yoga master just to enjoy a wank.
Ducatiproductions pretty much nailed it for me , too. I agree with all his points. IMO , bad camerawork has ruined more videos than anything else. For crying out loud , I just want to see things well...I don't want to get seasick. Cut the artistic bullshit , and keep it simple.
[Link]
Uncle Fester Deactivated User
I rock, therefore I am! 131 Posts 6/07
Posted - Aug 5 2007 : 1:23PM
Another great shot is when the girl is on the couch with her head hanging over the edge and we get a lot of HMA and an upside down facial.
Camera work is an aquired skill like anything else and it shows in a lot of porn. Camera work should be invisible and seamless. Somewhere along the way someone sold the consumers on the idea of bad camera work being more intense and real. Yep its real all right.... its called real amateur. Someone please get me some dramamine.
Actually, keeping it simple is as boring as watching grass grow. Porn actually does need artistic vision. Watch any Buttman flick and you know instantly that it's a Buttman flick. It's just that so much porn has been shot that it's hard for every director to reinvent the wheel. There are way too many camera dudes sitting around pointing the camera at the sex and making a fuckumentary instead or pornography. I always have and do consider porn to be art. Because not just anybody can make watchable porn without it eventually turning into repetitive nonsense. Edited by - randomprecision on 8/5/2007 10:21:16 PM
It's boring to you , Randomprecision....but to many others , it's comfortable and easy to watch. It's one thing to move the camera along at a reasonable pace in order to catch the action properly....but many operators don't know what the fuck they are doing and they are all over the place....is that exciting to you ? If it takes a fast moving camera to make the action interesting and /or "not boring"...then that means that the action is not happening. Good action doesn't require wild camerawork. ( ex. rodney moore , Darkko , etc. )
Hear Pure has a good point here. Cam ops that constantly move the camera make the it seem like the narrator has a short attention span. Good shots are few and far between because of the constant repositioning, and because the cam op feels a constant obligation to keep moving to maintain the pacing, the best shots are all too short. Consider one of the best cam ops in the business, one who has been a true pioneer in shaping norms in videography throughout the industry, Quasarman. When he finds a good angle he holds it, he never moves the camera for the sake of moving it. His shots are a made up of classic establishing, breakdown, re-establishing shots, only some of the transitions are done with mobile camera. Hats off, Quasarman. Try taking a scene that consists largely of mobile camera. Edit most of the motion out, and you'll see that in the end you're left with a string of the best shots. But if you have a cam op that's filming like they have ADD the scene might be short and sweet, but maybe too short, and might even be too short to fill up the intended time slot on the DVD. Not to mention cam ops that always keep the camera drifting are prone to letting the intended subject drift around the frame or even offscreen. Imagine a facial cumshot where the cam op drifts away just before the money shot so all you can see is a thigh or the edge of the couch or something. So it's always best to have a cam op who knows when to not cut a good shot short.
BTW, the Wide Angle or Fisheye lense isn't always a stylistic choice. The functional aspect of it is that it allows the cam op to get closer to the subject while showing more of the scene, or more of the subject if that's the goal. It allows a cam op to work in tigher spaces, like between a wall and a bed. It can even allow for more interaction between the cam op and the subject, for example if they're using toys on the model while they're filming or else they're even shooting POV material. That's why there's often the Fisheye visual characteristic in POV material. It never bothered me, I guess just because I always knew why they were using it. But some of the better cameras on the market nowdays can acheive pretty short focal lengths with no distortion. Also, 8mm and 16mm are pretty poor quality by current standards. The bigger, the better as far as image quality. That's why if you ever see in the behind the scenes footage where they're using little dinky cameras with a 2-liter bottle cap lense, the image quality sucks so bad. I've been there and tried that and wasn't proud of the results afterward. Cheap, outdated cameras just don't pay. Edited by - Jerry Hardman on 8/7/2007 6:22:36 AM
Quasar seems like a class act, and he's funny to boot. But one aspect of his camera work that I'm not too crazy about is I've seen scenes of his where he's thrown in a really long shot and I can't figure out why. I think there was one scene in Girlvana 2 where the girls were in a hot tub, and he had one shot where he filmed them from the other side of the yard. That would make sense if the scene had a plot where someone was spying on the girls from the bushes, to show the voyeur's POV, but since that scene didn't have a voyeur in the bushes, I don't understand why that long shot was there.
Sometimes I try to get artsy for no good reason except that I might be bored. Point well taken. I'll stop doing that. I think I was just impressed by the awesome landscaping in that yard and wanted to share it :) mod: extraneous quote removed - see the Forum Etiquette Edited by - hardware on 8/7/2007 12:25:32 PM
Posted - Jul 31 2007 : 11:38PM
