Directing the Camera

by Gil Bettman

  If the cinematographer can weigh in and lend his expertise to the process by which the stunts are storyboarded, this is a good thing, but it is not a necessity. A DP with serious action chops is going to have lots of good ideas. However, if you and the stunt coordinator know what you’re doing, and the DP knows what he is doing, then your ideas should mesh smoothly, and his contribution can be made on the set.

  If the DP works on the storyboards, he should be paid for his time. So, when you are working low-budget, whether or not he is in the loop before the start of shooting is usually a budgetary concern.

  STORYBOARDING IN PRACTICE — THE STORY IN STORYBOARDS

  For a storyboard to do its job it has to record your thinking about how to:

  1. Put the camera in the right place.

  2. Put the right lens on the camera.

  Since you only draw the boards you intend to shoot, then the story-boards, taken as a whole, tell you how to:

  3. Get the right number of pieces.

  The following set of storyboards was drawn for me by Doug Lefler in preparation for shooting the finale of my second feature film, Never Too Young to Die. These are not finished boards, but fairly rough. Doug generated them very quickly for bottom dollar, so he did not put as much care into the drawing as he would if he were working for a more mainstream production.

  This part of the finale of Never Too Young to Die was a classic ambush scene. Throughout the entire film, the villain, Ragnar (played with gusto by Gene Simmons), has been trying to poison the water supply of the city of Los Angeles, so that he can hold the city up for ransom. To do this he needs a computer disc. The disc has been stolen from him by James Bond. We actually got George Lazenby to play Bond. (To avoid copyright infringement Bond was called Stargrove, but, with Lazenby in the role, he was clearly a Bond knockoff.) Early on in the film, Ragnar kills Bond off, but not before Bond has slipped the disc to his teenage son, Lance. Lance (John Stamos) has no idea that his father is James Bond. He is just an innocent, everyday kid, who happens to be the son of James Bond, with all Bond’s killer genes. When Ragnar and all of his dastardly henchmen start coming after Lance, the boy rises to the occasion and becomes the next Bond.

  This was the story of the film, until the last act when Ragnar steals the disc back. Ragnar drives out to the reservoir to do his evil deed, with Lance in hot pursuit on a motorcycle. Ragnar runs out onto the dam that holds back the water supply and, using the all-important disc, he starts to set in motion the computer program by which the water will be poisoned. When he hears Lance coming on his motorcycle, Ragnar hides behind the elevator shaft that goes up the face of the dam. As Lance drives by him, Ragnar takes a crowbar and drives it into the spokes of the cycle. The bike goes down. Lance comes off the bike. The bike breaks through the railing at the top of the dam, and falls hundreds of feet to the canyon below, where it explodes. Lance almost follows it to his death, but catches himself and is left hanging there for dear life. This concludes the ambush portion of the finale. After this, they fight, and the stunt sequence continues on until Lance finally overcomes Ragnar and hurls him to his death.

  Steven Paul, the producer, deserves most of the credit for this paint-by-numbers script. In my defense, I had next to no input on it. Paul and his brother, Stuart, generated the first couple of drafts, and then paid Lorenzo Semple Jr. a six-figure salary for a quick rewrite. Semple obviously left the highly derivative plot intact and just gussied it up a bit. Having written some great spy thrillers — The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor, to name two — he certainly had the skills to make the script great. But it would have taken a monumental rewrite to make it great, the virtues of which would have been lost on Steven Paul, if not actively opposed by him. All Paul wanted was a knockoff of the Bond franchise, which he could call his own. If Cubby Broccoli had Bond, he would have Son-of-Bond.

  Semple added one brilliant flourish. Since most of the Bond villains were kinky in one way or another, he made Ragnar a hermaphrodite. I tried to run with this, and camp the film up as much as possible. Unfortunately, the value of admitting that what we were doing was highly derivative by having fun with it, as has been done very effectively by films such as Shaun of the Dead, was just a little too sophisticated for Steven Paul to grasp. The movie he wanted was a straight-ahead Bond knockoff, so he constrained my efforts to camp it up. The final film was leavened by a few self-mocking moments, but they are few and far between.

  Ragnar’s gender identification problems are why in the boards Doug Lefler drew for me, Ragnar sports a cape and stiletto high heels along with shoulder-length hair.

  The stunt coordinator on this film, Kerry Rossall, and I decided that these camera setups were the very best ones to make this action sequence come to life. This is one specific action sequence and one specific set of boards, but the reasoning used to generate these boards can be applied to a wide array of action sequences in order to identify the essential camera setups. Nothing is more important when shooting action.

  THE STORYBOARDS FOR THE AMBUSH FROM NEVER TOO YOUNG TO DIE

  Here are the camera setups and the reasons why we selected them.

  Board #1 — Figure 6.001

  This is a high, three-quarter angle, shot with a wide lens. The high, wide three-quarter, as this shot is commonly known, is the classic establishing shot. The value of putting the camera at a three-quarter (or 45 degree) angle to the central object in the shot is that from this position you can see the front and one side of everything in the frame. If you have a means of getting the camera up in the air, then you put it up high looking down on the action. This way you can see the top of the central object(s) in the frame, as well as what surrounds it. The high, wide three-quarter literally sees more of whatever you are trying to establish. This is why I drew frame #1 looking down on Ragnar from a wide, three-quarter angle as he jumps out of the truck with his laptop and runs toward the dam. (Doug Lefler drew it, as I saw the shot and described it to him, but for the sake of convenience, from here on, I will resort to verbal shorthand, and say I drew the shots.)

  Board #2 — Figure 6.001

  This is a high shot, looking almost straight down. The motion is across the lens, so it would be made more dynamic if it was shot with a long lens. When I am explaining this shot to a classroom of students, I simplify the rationale behind the shot by first asking the class why I decided to do the shot as drawn, and then, before they can respond, I answer, “Because I could.” I then go on to explain the trick behind this question. The road out onto this dam — the Big Tujunga Canyon Dam, outside of LA — ran under the dam warden’s house. The house was surrounded on all sides by a balcony, so the dam warden could view the dam from a great variety of angles. To get shot #2 all I would have to do is point up to this balcony and tell one of the camera operators to carry a camera up to the balcony and get a top-down shot on Ragnar as he runs out onto the dam.

  When you are shooting an action sequence and you see an easily accessible platform where you could quickly set up the camera and get a high, straight down shot by running the action underneath it, you do it.

  ● If you can quickly and easily put the camera in the air and shoot straight down, do it.

  This is because, when you are shooting action on a budget, the camera is almost always at eye level or on the ground. You keep the camera at this level not so much by choice, but out of necessity. This way you can shoot faster and get more pieces. Putting the camera up in the air usually slows you down. It also generally requires a crane, which is expensive. So the default pattern is to keep the camera on sticks or on the ground. But this can become visually monotonous. It refreshes the eyes to suddenly switch from repeatedly looking at the action from eye level to looking at it from a bird’s-eye view. Hence, Board #2 is a straight-down shot.

  Board #3 — Figure 6.001

  The dam warden grew flowers in a ground-level flower box along the side of the road that led out onto the dam. I thought it would be campy and funny to see
Ragnar express his determination to let no evil deed go undone by pulling up a large handful of these flowers as he ran by.

  One of my rules when shooting action is:

  ● If you think you can get a laugh, go for it.

  I have been often derided by producers, cameramen, stuntmen, and others for doing so. Usually I am told that a joke is not in keeping with the tone of a life-and-death action sequence. But I have found there is a very fine line between violence and comedy, and that you can usually cross it and cross back in a heartbeat, without diminishing the threat of the violence. If this were not the case, professional wrestling would not exist. The value in this is that it makes your stunt sequence distinctive and somehow unique. Every stunt you do has been done thousands of times before. However, if you put a slight comedic spin on it, you make it different and your own. This is the fundamental principle underlying the monumental success of Jackie Chan.

  FIGURE 6.001

  The flower box was partially blocked in the straight down angle of Board #2, so I drew a second board of this action from a straight side angle in Board #3. Ragnar is moving across the lens, so it would best be done with a long lens, since the long lens accelerates motion across the lens.

  Board #4 — Figure 6.001

  This board is drawn as a straight down shot for all the reasons that Board #2 is a straight down shot. However, whereas Board #2 was intended to be a long lens shot, because the motion is across the lens and this would make it seem faster, Board #4 would best be shot with a wide-angle lens, because the camera pans up with Ragnar as he runs out onto the dam, thus revealing and establishing the location where the final action sequence was going to play out. If it is big and you want to establish all of it, use the wide-angle lens.

  Board #5 — Figure 6.002

  In Board #5 the camera is up in the air shooting almost straight down on Ragnar as he runs under the lens. I chose to put the camera in this position for the same reason as in the setup in Board #2 — because I could. An elevator shaft ran up the face of the dam, as can be seen in Board #4. The machine room at the top of the shaft was accessed by a metal staircase that ran up outside of the shaft. Board #5 is drawn shooting straight down on Ragnar from the top of this staircase.

  Because the action is across the lens, ordinarily it would be shot with the long lens. But the long lens would make the bottom of the dam seem closer and therefore diminish the depth of the drop. Since this ambush would end with the hero, Lance, almost falling off the edge of the dam, I wanted to emphasize the depth of the drop. That would best be done with a wide-angle lens. So I split the difference between the two lenses and drew this setup as if it were to be shot with a “normal” — 50mm — lens.

  Board #6 — Figure 6.002

  In this shot Ragnar is depicted going down on his knees with his laptop in front of him on the balcony that girded the elevator shaft. This is the best camera position for this piece of the ambush because:

  1. It does a good job of showing the audience what Ragnar is doing.

  2. It reveals that this building has a front and side to it, and so by positioning himself on the back side of it, Ragnar will be hidden from Lance when Lance follows him out onto the dam.

  Therefore it is crucial to shoot this setup from a three-quarter angle to the elevator shaft. The three-quarter angle puts the camera on a diagonal, at 45 degrees to the subject, thus revealing that there is a back side to this elevator shaft, behind which Ragnar can hide and ambush Lance.

  Board #7 — Figure 6.002

  The purpose of this shot was to generate suspense by making it clear that Ragnar was just a few minutes away from succeeding in poisoning the water supply. This was the message revealed on the screen of his laptop: “Detonation Program Complete. Thank you. Time remaining 3:00.” Having launched my directing career by shooting inserts for a number of episodic TV series at Universal, I knew that the only way the audience could read the type of this message on the screen, and feel the imminent danger, was if the shot was much tighter than what is drawn in Board #7. It would have to be framed up within the borders of the screen of the laptop. But to cut from the shot in Board #6 to a shot inside the frame of the computer screen would have been disorienting, and felt like a jump cut. This made it necessary to shoot the shot drawn in Board #7. It would serve as an intermediate-size bridge piece to get to the money shot — the shot framed up within the screen of the laptop.

  There was no need to draw the tighter money shot, since the science of putting a computer screen inside a movie screen is as complicated as putting the square peg in the square hole. A chimpanzee could do it.

  FIGURE 6.002

  Board #8 — Figure 6.002

  Having given the audience the visual data needed to convince them that Ragnar was on the verge of succeeding at poisoning the water supply of the city of Los Angeles, I decided that the best way to tell the story was to introduce the possibility that Lance might be able to stop him. This is the purpose of Board #8. It reveals that Lance has arrived on the scene. He is shown driving his motorcycle past where Ragnar parked his truck. This orients the audience as to exactly where the hero is in relation to the villain. Lance can drive out on the dam on his motorcycle, so, in real time, we are now seconds away from the moment of truth.

  Board #8 is drawn as a ground-level, extreme wide-angle shot. This is the cheapest, easiest way to sell a motorcycle run-by. You throw the camera on the ground and tell the stuntman to drive as close to it as he can without hitting it. Since the wide-angle lens accelerates motion as it passes by the lens, this camera position and lens selection produce a high-energy shot that is fast and easy to do.

  You can usually put an operator on the camera for such a low, wide shot. But, if there is any chance the stuntman might lose control of the bike, the camera is placed in a metal box — a crash housing — to protect it, and the housing is then positioned carefully on the ground, using sandbags.

  Board #9 — Figure 6.002

  Board #9 is the same setup as Board #7. It would be shot at the same time, or immediately after shooting the setup in Board #7. The camera is in this position, because from here it can best tell the story by revealing that, after setting the detonation sequence in motion, Ragnar suddenly detects the sound of Lance’s motorcycle, and is alerted to his approach. As I explained in Chapter 3, in any scene the center of the drama is in the eyes of the person who is talking or carrying the scene. Board #9 is drawn in this position to catch the look in Ragnar’s eyes.

  Board #10 — Figure 6.003 and Board #11 — Figure 6.003

  Board #10 was drawn intentionally to show that this shot is identical to the shot in Board #2 and would be done immediately after the shot in Board #2. Similarly Board #11 was drawn to reveal that this setup is the same as the setup in Board #4 and would be shot immediately after that setup. This is because when you are shooting action on a budget, you save time and money if:

  ● After you have carefully set up a shot, putting the camera in the right place with the right lens on it, you then stage every piece of action in front of that camera that you think you might need.

  It takes from fifteen minutes to a half an hour for the camera operators and assistants to prepare the camera for the shot, but it only takes a minute or two to run another piece of action in front of that camera. In the interest of generating the maximum number of pieces in the minimum amount of time, it makes sense to double up (or even triple up) on every setup. Once the camera or cameras are in place, stage every piece of action you can think of in front of them before moving on.

  Board #12 — Figure 6.003

  Board #12 was drawn intentionally to show that this setup is identical to the one drawn in Board #6. To save time the action in this frame — Ragnar jumping to his feet and hiding himself from view — could be shot with the same lens from the same position as Board #6. What is crucial in both these shots is to reveal that when he is standing on the balcony behind the elevator shaft, Ragnar cannot be seen by Lance, as Lance
drives out on the dam.

  Board #13 — Figure 6.003

  This board is drawn as a tie-in shot — a shot that shows two or more of the players in a stunt sequence in the same frame. In Board #13 you can see both Ragnar hiding and Lance approaching. I ordinarily avoid tie-in shots. My rule of thumb on tie-in shots is:

  FIGURE 6.003

  ● When you are shooting a chase or any action sequence that unfolds over an expanse of terrain, you avoid shooting tie-ins, especially if you are working low budget.

  For reasons that I explain in the following chapter (see page 132), tie-ins are usually more trouble than they are worth. You get more good pieces in less time if you shoot each player in a separate setup and then cut back and forth between the players to give the impression that they are chasing each other or involved in same action sequence.

  I broke my own rule in the case of Board #13 because it depicted the kind of event in an action sequence that makes it worth the time and trouble to shoot a tie-in. Specifically,

  ● It is worth the trouble to shoot a tie-in to establish or re-establish the spatial relationship between the participants in an action sequence.

  In this case, the tie-in acts as a sort of master and establishes the geography of the chase or action sequence. Board #13 (Figure 6.003) established the geography of the ambush at the dam by showing that Lance could not see Ragnar, and so, the farther Lance drove out onto the dam, and the closer he got to Ragnar, the greater the likelihood that Ragnar could successfully ambush him.

  Board #14 — Figure 6.003

  The shot drawn in this board is all about the eyes. Ragnar has suddenly spotted something, off camera, camera right, and he is directing his attention at it. This is drawn as a full frontal close-up, because, as I explained in Chapter 3, the frontal close-up “sees more eyes.”