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Mechanical I: Camera Technology and Our Visual Language
by Mike Jones
Television, as the dominant media of our modern world, is distinctly a "techno-cultural" form, meaning two things: first (and simplest) that TV is a cultural medium that cannot, and does not, exist without technology. Theatre exists without a stage or proscenium arch and whilst the printing press certainly makes mass distribution easier; writing and literature can exist with nothing more than charcoal and a wall. But TV is a form tied inextricably to the technology of its production and delivery. TV is a noun both for the media-form and for the device.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the term "techno-cultural" suggests that for every technological advancement in how we capture TV images there is cultural impact on how we relate to the images we are watching; how we feel about characters, environments, world events and dramatic narratives.
Whilst technological change in TV creation happens right across the production process–writing screenplays in word-processors instead of on typewriters, editing on computers instead of flat-bed benches–the most effecting shifts in TV sensibilities, from an audience's perspective, come principally from changing the way TV images are captured–the camera.
The camera is our all-seeing eyeball on the world and subsequently how we mount, move and position the camera has a profound impact on our TV screen expectations. The history of the moving image is essentially a history of the camera-support apparatus that begins with the humble Tripod.
The Tripod was an obvious choice for mounting the first moving picture cameras as cinema was seen simply as an extension of still photography and a great proportion of the world's earliest cinematographers came from a photographic background. Indeed the technical principles of cinematography and photography are virtually identical and it isn't really until the development of videotape recorders in the mid-fifties (starting with the Ampex VRX-1000 in 1956) and their widespread adoption for TV production with quality video cameras by the 'eighties, that there is a significant departure away from celluloid photographic princples.
The humble tripod gave us, without ever really trying, one of the basic visual tenets of filmmaking, that is the mounting of the camera at human height and shooting at eyeline. This may seem obvious, and certainly it is not to say that cinematographers didn't experiment with all sorts of weird and wonderful camera placements and angles, but the dominant visual form, then as now, is for the camera to be placed at upper-chest height. It can be argued that this was, for the most part, simply driven by what was most comfortable for the operator. Apart from ergonomics, there is no real reason why the camera has to be at this height. A perfectly neutral image frame can also be captured from the camera set at a more waist level (so long as it is not very close up). Indeed, seminal Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu (among other contemporaries in Europe) shot virtually all his films with deliberately shortened tripods and the camera set at waist level subsequently forging quite different visual sensibilities for Japanese cinema in this era. However, a more eyeline level for mounting the tripod dominated and continues to be the norm for cinematic form today.
However, as camera technology improved and, in particular, cameras grew smaller and lighter, the tripods of the time revealed a distinct flaw: they didn't move very well. Because the tripod's lineage came from still photography, it was never really designed to pan and tilt with fluid ease. More importantly when the operator did move the camera on these tripods to follow action, the movements were jerky, inconsistent and rough.
Certainly this movement problem had an impact on the aesthetics of cinematography with images appearing less polished and less professional. More importantly however, the non-fluid movements of traditional tripods broke one of the fundamental foundations of the cinematic form that had been (and still is) rarely challenged–it made the audience aware of the camera and its operator breaking an illusion of apparatus absence.
Until this time the prevailing aesthetic was to make the camera as apparatus (and by proxy its operator) invisible, promoting the audience to fully immerse themselves in the screen image with complete suspension of disbelief. The common rolling dollys and swinging jibs didn't present the same problem because their movements were finely controlled, smooth and flowing, dedicated to keeping the camera steady, rarely drawing attention to themselves as human controlled. The movements of a wheeled dolly are not "human" movements, where as the jiggling, jerky movements of the tripod being panned and tilted make a viewer immediately aware of an operator on the other side of the camera.
The first major attempt to address this problem was the Akeley tripod. Employing a gyro-head built on a series of gears, fly-wheels and ball bearings, the Akeley gave perfectly smooth movements with a great deal of control via speed controlled cranks. However, whilst popular for a long period of time, several aspects conspired to end the reign of the Akeley; cameras kept getting smaller and TV was coming with unprecedented demands on production speed and efficiency.
The definitive answer came from an Australian, Eric Miller, who in 1946 patented the first design for an hydraulic fluid-head tripod, a design that was to change forever not just how TV and film was shot but also our perceptions and expectations of the moving image itself.
The fluid-head uses hydraulic chambers filled with a thick viscous oil to dampen movements. With no gears and no cranks the fluid-head tripod provided perfectly smooth tilts and pans from a light-weight, totally portable tripod, without any of the noise and bulk of gear based heads like the Akeley.
The impact was enormous and the timing was perfect. In less than ten years after Eric Miller had lodged his patent, TV had arrived en masse and suddenly portability, production efficiency, fast turn-around and cost suppression was paramount to the fledgling TV studios, particularly in taking over where the cinema theatre news-reels were leaving off. The fluid-head gave them this without sacrificing the remote, fourth-wall perspective that had already been ingrained into audience's visual sensibilities. Smooth, even camera movements that maintained the operator"s "invisibility", capturing sporting events and current affairs were all possible from a compact 16mm camera and a fully portable, non-mechanical tripod.
However the impact of the fluid-head went much further than just practicality. The combination of smooth movements on a totally portable, compact device freed the camera from a great many of the physical constraints it had suffered through the first fifty years of the moving image. The camera could now be placed, and even move, in spaces and locations that were hugely difficult, or just not physically possible, previously. The effect on audiences was to greatly alter their expectations of the camera, to raise their tolerance for faster, sharper camera movements, to break much of accepted, static or staged visual grammar. Whilst cinema was moving slowly within the confines of accepted visual structures, TV production, by comparison, was forging the way for everything the cinema would adopt over the next thirty years. The use of small 16mm cameras on fluid-head tripods was the first substantial step towards freeing the camera from physicality altogether.
In the meantime, however, with audiences getting more and more used to the idea of their screen frame moving freely over a visual space, there was a more immediate hurdle to pass. The maintenance of the illusion of the invisible camera/operator, whilst periodically challenged by many filmmakers, was still the prevailing visual tenet. It would take another downsizing of the camera to seriously challenge this notion and entrench our awareness of the camera's presence in the frame. In doing so, our perspective on "truth" and "reality" would change forever.
The first major step towards true hand-held camera shooting came from 16mm cameras that were re-designed to be mounted on the shoulder. In the sixties in particular a small but dynamic group of filmmakers, with pioneers like John Cassavettes, took to this new-found ultra-portability for the creation of documentaries and intimate narrative-realist films. More than just portability and maneuverability, the mounting of cameras on the shoulder was also a challenge to the well established chest-height shooting level inherited from the tripod. This visual distinction and the increasingly mobile camera established a visual reference that saw audiences recognizing clear visual differences between fiction and non-fiction images.
This idea has become entrenched with the widespread uptake, by both professionals and amateurs, of the hand-held camera. Principally in the form of inexpensive DV format cameras, hand-helds have become the mainstay of a very large proportion of our mediascape centered on TV daily news and current affairs. The impact of this shift in technology and perception is immensely significant.
In doing away with any form of stabilizer, hand-held camera images, through obvious human shake, handling and jerky movement, make no pretense at all that the camera (as apparatus) and operator (as human being) are not wholly present in the frame and action. The camera and its operator are as much a part of the shot as the framed subject and we as audiences are often actively aware of their presence and influence.
In the twenty-first century the indelible images of key world events, most notably the World Trade Centre collapse and the 2004 Boxing day Tsunamis, have been recorded into our minds not by professional TV crews and equipment, but by shaky, poorly shot, hand-held footage taken by amateurs. Moreover the off-the-cuff commentary of the operator becomes a part of the framed experience as well. Some of the first images of the Tsunami disaster to go to air came from a tourist video taping a wave crashing across the beach front of their resort. At first the man comments simply, and somewhat nonchalantly, on a bigger-than-normal wave. He calls to his family to take a look from the balcony. As the wave crashes over the beach and quickly begins to devour the landscape his demeanor changes dramatically from nonchalance to panic. But the audio from this footage of the man speaking is not that of a journalist commentating an event to the viewers; the tourist as operator is oblivious to the viewers. The commentary is a snapshot of unconstructed, in-the-moment reality that cares nothing for the viewer. As a result we experience this event not in the passive remoteness of the "invisible" camera, but rather from an immediate and human perspective directly engaged in the drama.
The more hand-held footage of this nature becomes a substantial part of our TV news and experience of world events, the more our visual language shifts to incorporate it into our everyday visual understandings and, more importantly, expectations. The result is that we, as audiences have developed an ingrained reaction to shaky, hand-held video footage; we associate it with "truth".
From pixelated camera-phone footage beamed out of Iraq by "embedded" journalists, to handycam footage of Tsunami flood waters sweeping away fleeing fishermen, we increasingly associate the "amateur" footage of the handycam with truthful representation and, inversely, view "professional," high-quality images with some skepticism.
This notion is being seized upon as readily by TV news (hunting down local amateur footage of events before sending out their own crews) as it is by dramatic fiction. A great many productions (even entire feature films, with obvious examples like The Blair Witch Project) (1) seek deliberately to invoke and exploit this accepted visual literacy. TV police dramas in particular have been quick to exploit the immediacy and personal engagement that is possible through shooting with shaky hand-held cameras, using techniques that play directly against the established notions of the "invisible". With this technique directors directly link their narratives, in the minds of viewers, to documentary and news reporting. Through this specific visual referencing to another media form these dramas have the potential to feel more "truthful" to media-literate audiences.
The evolution of our visual language, used by media creators and fluently read by audiences, is inextricably tied to the mechanics of capturing the image. As cameras became more portable our expectations of the moving image became more fluid, dynamic and expressive. However, what ties all these technology shifts together is their attachment to physical space. In the past a camera could only go where a physical camera would fit, and so our visual expectations have been tied to the "real", physical world and its tangible restrictions. But the twenty-first century is challenging this notion as well as the "virtual camera" becomes more and more an everyday part of visual media aesthetics.
The virtual camera doesn't just exist in virtual environments (computer games and animated films) but is increasingly commonplace in conventional live-action productions. A virtual camera is simply the "frame" through which an image is captured from within, or composited from, a non-real, computer generated space. It can be moved, panned, tilted and zoomed, it can have its lens dimensions changed from fish-eye to telephoto, it is placed in a space and shifted to "shoot" footage just as a physical camera would, but it holds one key distinction: it can move anywhere the operator wants. Through walls, through keyholes, under doors, any angle, any position.
To date, most uses of virtual cameras and 3D environments have been restricted to emulating "real" cameras. Directors have been very hesitant to break from the perceived physicality of the camera, concerned that they'll break the illusion for the viewer. Elements such as depth-of-field, which exist only for glass-lens cameras and are essentially irrelevant for the virtual camera, are very often falsely constructed in order to maintain the illusion of "real" lens properties and an associated aesthetic which is innately familiar.
But just as these same concerns were voiced in regard to using moving tripods and hand-held cameras only to be subsequently broken down forging a new visual acceptance, so to will we see an increasing rise in the use of virtual cameras capturing images that are physically impossible. Our visual language will dramatically change once again driven by the technology of moving image capture. What impact this will have the stories we tell and how we tell them, remains to be seen and explored...
1. The Blair Witch Project. 1994. D. Myrick & E. Sanchez. Haxan films.
Mike Jones is a digital media producer, educator and writer. He is the author of the book Viewfinder: an introduction to movies and visual media in the digital age and has penned more than 150 published essays, articles and reviews. Currently Mike is manager of the VectorLab digital media studio at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney and is undertaking PhD research on cinematic space.
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