Action Scenes
Don’t do this at home!
Facing your fear can sometimes be valuable to shoot scenes in where your own fear is carried on to in the shots. But you should be very careful. Never do it when you have even a little bit of doubt.
When a shot in a mysterious way contains a emotion it is most likely your personal emotion as a camera operator that is communicated through the shot.
I am afraid of venomous snakes so to shoot the snake scene I hung the camera on a bamboo stick. Because I know that a cobra can spit poison in your eyes over a distance of 3 meters, I used a 4 meter long stick.
For the scene of the man walking on the high bridge; I’m afraid of heights. So in order to shoot that scene I made a bamboo crane like in the “SSC tools” video section to get the camera on all the angles that scare me. Using a little LCD video screen I could control the camera and see these angles.
I was also scared when I was shooting the scene of the students protest because three years earlier (1995) I had been filming a clash between the military and students in Indonesia. But I got caught and after long interrogation I spent 4 days in prison before being deported out the country.
Inspiring people about the art of filming
Some quotes to think about
I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of camera-stylo (camera-pen)[…] to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language.
I wish I had a camera that can move freely in space.[...]
that at any moment can go anywhere, at any speed.
The play of pure movement […], vigorous and abundant. All this we shall be able to create when the camera has at last has been dematerialized”. Only with this essential instrument shall we be able to realize new possibilities. [...]The camera is the director's sketching pencil. It should be as mobile as possible to catch every passing mood.
The camera must be equally as ready to move as to remain still. […] The camera has a human quality it is a projection of hand and eye, almost a living part of the operator, instantly in tune with his awareness.