Gripes about filming

One thing that should go along with filming tips, are a few gripes about filming.  You need to know what's good, as well as what's bad.  Watching “home video” television shows has made me thoroughly glad that we didn't own a video or movie-film camera when we were young.

Out-of-focus shots

It's bad enough when something goes out of focus for a moment, but there's next to no point continuously shooting something that's out of focus.  Apart from it being irritating, it's utterly useless.  You can't see what's being filmed.

The “move in close, and use wide-angle,” solution produces better results for various reasons:  Focus is less critical with a wide-angle lens.  Camera wobbles are less noticeable with a wide-angle lens.  And the sound will be better when you're closer to what you're filming.

Turn off the auto-focus, it cannot tell what part of the picture is supposed to be in focus.

Wobbly camera shots

Images that move wildly around are annoying and difficult to watch, avoid it.  While it seems to be a current trend in movies and television shows to do that, it's immitating bad camera work.  It's a stupid trend, why would you want to immitate incompetent camerawork?  Try hard to avoid wobbly shots, including shots that move around too much (whether wobbly or smoothly done), it makes people feel seasick.

Distracting noises

Watching something where it's hard to hear what's going on isn't nice.  It's difficult to follow what's happening, and makes it a strain.

Unedited work

It's really quite boring to watch something that's much longer than it needs to be, and tests your patience if you wanted to learn about something you're watching.  And something filmed from just a single point of view doesn't give a clear idea of what's going on.


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