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High Maintenance Camera Shots
First Assistant Director Bruce Terris talks a lot about "master single-single" to Pete and DP Pete Biagi. What the hell is he talking about?
"Master single-single" is cameraman speak for covering a scene. A "master" shot covers all characters in one single composition. As two people are talking, the frame of a master shot will encompass all actors speaking in the scene. "Single" shots are then used to cover the individual actors as they are reciting their respective lines.
Here's how it goes: Camera sets up for master shot, run scene. Camera sets up for single shot of Actor A, run scene again. Camera sets up for single shot of Actor B, run scene a third time.
And that is movie making at its simplest: covering a scene of talking heads and editing it together in a seamless and understandable way.
Why did Bruce push for simplicity? That's his job. With only 25 days to shoot an entire feature-length movie, and only a million bucks to do it, resources of every kind were limited. Bruce's biggest responsibility was to get every scene shot, and to have every necessary angle.
Pete and Pete were different stories, however. It is not uncommon for the director and the DP to be overly ambitious when conceiving their storyboards and shot lists. And it is the first assistant director whose job it is to reel them in.
Did Bruce do an effective job of keeping his new director in check? Yes and no.
Herewith, a look at some of Pete's high-maintenance shots during the filming of "Stolen Summer:"
Dolly Shot: On the first day of shooting, Pete waits until the end of the day to begin shooting his most difficult and time-consuming scene. A dolly shot is when a camera is mounted on a small, movable unit that rolls on wheels along a track. The problem is that Pete envisioned shooting one continuous take of his two child leads walking underneath the El tracks. With no cuts in the scene, both young actors were forced to recite their lines for the entire scene without an edit anywhere in sight. As the day wears on, the children, and the crew, grow a little weary, and the shot becomes increasingly difficult to effectively execute. It did not help that the El train's loud rumble came and went overhead for the better part of the afternoon.
Process Trailer Rig: Day 2. Pete's money scene, where "Margaret," played by Bonnie Hunt, drives her eight children to church on a frenzied Sunday morning. It is a short scene, where young "Pete" gazes out the back of the station wagon, as his mom and the other children in the car engage in brief dialogue. Easy enough, right? Well Pete Jones and Pete Biagi insisted that the scene, which takes place entirely in a car, be shot while "Margaret" is driving, rather than, say, in a parked vehicle. The DP and his crew were forced to rig a camera onto a process trailer, which essentially tows the car behind it, and it looks as though the actor is driving the car. The problem: The cars parked on the residential streets (viewable through the car's window as it was towed) were 2001 SUV's, not exactly a common sight in 1976 Chicago.
Crane Shot: Toward the end of the film, "Danny" attempts to swim out to a buoy in Lake Michigan, and Biagi wanted to use a crane. The most obvious uses of a crane shot are to view the actors from above or to move up and away from them, a common way of ending a movie. But some filmmakers like to have the camera on a boom arm just to make it easier to move around between ordinary set-ups. Most cranes accommodate both the camera and an operator, but some can be operated by remote control. While shooting on the lake, the wind and water make pulling off this already ambitious shot even more difficult.
Robert Altman's "The Player" contains an opening crane shot where the camera tracks Tim Robbins' character pulling into his parking spot. The camera lowers, and in one continuous shot, follows Robbins inside his office. In actuality, it is believed that Altman used at least one cut in this eight-minute sequence, though it is invisible to the layperson's eye.
Steadicam: With the invention of a harness called the Steadicam, which allows the operator to carry his camera while a set of counterweights damp the vibrations that would otherwise be caused by his walking or running, smooth hand-held work replaced dolly shots in many movies.
Two famous examples of brilliant Steadicam are "The Shining," where Kubrick follows Danny through the halls of the hotel while he is riding on his Big Wheel, and "Goodfellas," when Henry and Karen walk from the street, down through the back entrance of a nightclub, through the kitchen, and into the club in one continuous sequence.
In the absence of an expensive Steadicam rig, Pete uses a "dance floor" for one scene to create a similar effect. A dance floor, essentially a poor man's Steadicam, is a laid area of smooth wood flooring designed to allow the cameraman to walk easily amid a scene to create a continuous sequence. Pete uses this to shoot a wake scene, but said scene did not make it past the cutting room floor.
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