Per Holmes – Hollywood Camera Work – The Master Course
Salepage : Per Holmes – Hollywood Camera Work – The Master Course
There aren’t many things that can get me up at 5.00 a.m. to study and acquire new talents, but Per Holmes’ unique and absolutely outstanding training resource is one of them. I wanted to learn how to properly shoot drama in order to improve my directing abilities. I knew I wanted to enhance my camerawork skills, so when I came across this 6-DVD box set at hollywoodcamerawork.com, I decided to give it a try.
While anybody can aim and shoot a camera, perfecting camera work may take years. Per Holmes’ Hollywood Camera Work Master Course gives you a fast pathway to obtaining crucial professional camerawork abilities. In reality, with over nine hours of instruction, extensive examples, and downloadable back up material, this is a stand-alone course that outperforms many college and university cinema courses.
The gadgets, camera locations, camera angles, and camera motions that a filmmaker use to create a story through the medium of film are referred to as high-end blocking and staging. It goes without saying that understanding and applying the guidelines of blocking methods can substantially improve your filmmaking. Despite this, most books, DVDs, and film schools only cover the fundamentals. The Master Course is a strong blocking system and an unusual camera work language that may profoundly transform the way you direct. The course was established by filmmaker Per Holmes, who spent over a half-decade building an all-inclusive language of high-end feature camera work for personal use, and then recognized how much others would benefit from these skills, which he provides with us in this complete 6 DVD box set. These DVDs are quite beneficial even for veteran filmmakers. This is a precise training resource that will assist you in developing exceptional camerawork abilities. Many of the methods presented here are fantastic for improving your camerawork from the “student film” level seen in many other training books to what is recognizably the same style employed on Hollywood films and top-tier TV shows.
The Master Course goes far beyond any current filmmaking program. It is designed for professionals who want to take their blocking skills to the next level, as well as those transitioning from another discipline, but it can be used by filmmakers of any level who are committed to mastering high-end directing. Skilled camera work enhances the production value of anything you shot.
Shooting drama is difficult; any experienced director will tell you that it involves more than just pointing a camera or two at the action to gain coverage. A well-employed camera is an important narrative tool that may be utilized to generate most of the emotion in a scene. Simply by using exact composition of the frames, cuts between them, and the way the camera travels, it may make an actor look powerful, alone, or terrified.
Camera work is a vital talent that all directors, editors, cinematographers, scriptwriters, and performers – as well as the cameramen – must understand. In fact, it is the talent that characterizes filmmaking – the art of generating a moving image. Most videographers lack a thorough knowledge of the hows and whys of outstanding camera work.
The Master Training consists of six DVDs totaling nine hours in length; the course begins with shot sizes and rudimentary framing with static cameras, progresses to employing moving cameras, and concludes with the building of numerous entire scenes. All of the actors on screen are five simple computer mannequins, with an intelligent and well-scripted voice-over detailing how the camerawork affects and enhances the visual story-telling. They are not performers; they cannot move, talk, or make any gestures other than with their heads. They have no ability to express themselves! This is fantastic because (and this is critical) all of the emotion in the sequences comes from the camerawork, not the performers. Working within these self-imposed constraints, Holmes demonstrates how to change the camera angles to make the same subject appear dangerous, desperate, trustworthy, or suspicious.
Knowing where to set your cameras is only the beginning. Holmes also demonstrates how to include the roles of director, editor, set dresser, and lighting director into your camerawork. Beginning with the screenplay, he demonstrates how to guide the movement of actors and extras to highlight essential sections of the story, how to transition between cameras to manage the viewer’s attention, and how to outfit and light sets to create fascinating locations that photograph well.
Are you ready for a surprise? Storyboarding is an ineffective filmmaking tool. Let me paraphrase Per Holmes: “Storyboards are essentially 2D; each shot is a new shot with a different camera set-up.” You’re thinking in a sequential and discrete manner. Because film is about displaying a 3D world in 2D, you must learn to think in 3D.” Holmes’ novel technique is to make keyframes. These are the most significant shots in a scene. Then you work out where to put the cameras to acquire those pictures, as well as how to get there through cutting and editing. “It’s all about thinking backwards,” he explains. “It appears like we obtain fantastic images by chance, but it’s all well planned.” As a consequence, the camerawork is smooth and fluid, with a high level of creativity that works equally well for drama, action, comedy, music videos, and any other form of film.
The nine hours of instruction are divided into three sets on six DVDs. The first book, Stationary Blocking, concentrates on a non-moving camera and introduces (or reviews) focus, shot selection, framing, the axis line, and the psychology of camera/character placement. Volume 2, The Moving Camera, expands on the previous with camera dolly and crane/jib maneuvers. Volume 3 Staging High-End Scenes provides a real-world example from which the viewer may learn. You start with a screenplay (which you can get from the site) and work your way through the staging and blocking of the scene and actors before presenting the full scene to see how it all fits together.
While the information in this collection is well-organized, the end user must understand that the only way to get the most out of these DVDs is to go out and apply the skills for themselves. The Hollywood Camera Work website provides links to various businesses and people that provide low-cost alternatives to large rigs and cranes.
What’s the problem? The content can be a touch tedious at times, and the teacher’s single voice, while lovely, can get a little monotonous, but the quality and sheer information density keep it from being too dry. This Master Class instruction, on the other hand, is a far more helpful educational resource than any book. On a more serious note, keep in mind that this is a course on how to direct high-production-value images for film or video. This course does not cover how to direct actors or how to stage and block for reality-based programs such as talk shows, but it does get you thinking about the actor staging and blocking that will be required to acquire the shots you need. The performances are somewhat wooden!
I thought I knew at least the fundamentals that Per covers in the first four or five chapters of the DVD, but I learnt a huge lot in the first 30 minutes – from vocabulary to space utilization, everything described wonderfully well. And it simply keeps getting better – the chapters on storyboarding and shot sequence creation, in particular, are groundbreaking and fantastic.
