I have always wondered this. I'm not directing now but I am in the future. Soo, how do you work with only one camera? For example, you have a conversation going between a parent and son. There's around 3 different shots in the scene. How do you do that? I've always been confused on it.

Usually, when I use one camera in your case I would shoot the scenes three times in the three different shots your speaking of. editing takes care of the rest when you cut up and match the scenes together. then you have the effect of the cameras switching back and forth in the scene.

Well the traditional way to do dialogue would be to set up the camera in a position over the parent's shoulder and facing the child and film the scene however many times until you are satisfied with the child's performance.

Then you would reset up all your lights and such and change the camera position to over the child's shoulder and facing the parent, and film the scene however many times (trying to be as consistent as possible) until you are satisfied with the parent's performance.

And then typically the camera is set up in a wide position that includes both characters and the surrounding environment for a couple more takes of the scene.

Of course this is just the basic, traditional way of doing dialogue, it can really get shaken up in all sorts of ways.

I'm still alittle confused. If you do a scene with only one person, wouldn't the timing be off then if you use different shots? And then with the child/parent scenario, wouldn't there be continuity problems and the audio wouldn't be synced to their mouths correctly?

Hopefully they will teach all this more clearly when I attend film school.

Well you record a new individual audio track every time you film a shot, so your audio should never be mismatched to the movement of your actor's mouths because for every video clip from every angle there should be the matching corresponding audio clip that you recording with it.

To answer your first question, when you are filming a scene with one camera, the timing and pacing issue to make sure all the shots line up and flow right is mostly done in the editing process.
Other than that you just have to make sure the movement and position of your actors is consistent from take to take. You can sometimes put placemarkers or little X's made out of tape on the floor to make sure your actors make it to the same location on every take.

Also you want to make sure you film more of an action than you intend to include in the final shot. For example lets say you have two shots:

Shot 1) Tracking shot from behind as a character carefully approaches a door and opens it slowly, and steps into the doorway.

Shot 2) Stationary shot from the front, the character stands in the threshold and looks around.

You wouldn't want to start filming Shot 2 with your character already standing in the doorway. You would want to start filming Shot 2 with your character opening the door and then stepping into the threshold. Even though the action of your character opening the door is fully covered in Shot 1, it still gives you some more room to make the cut transition between the two shots with better timing and flow.

Is this the type of thing you were asking about?

quote:

Originally posted by braininabox:
Is this the type of thing you were asking about?

Yes thank you! I think I get it now.

I remember starting out with single camera production and was also confused with how they synced it all up.

with digital video tapes now a new audio track is made with the video track and everything can be shot out of sequence/order. In post-production the editor will put it in order and fix everything up.

You do have to plan a little bit when filming to make sure everything flows well from shot to shot. Example being two people walking into a store.
If you film outside to get them walking in and then do that shot over again to have them walking in as you are inside you better be sure the same person opens the door first or it will look really messed up in the final cut.

If you look up my youtube, Sonicorbstudios, you will see a bakery video I was part of. The example I gave you in this post was what I was refering to in my video.

Notice how I shot the scene from outside first then moved inside. I was sure to tell the customers to walk in the same way they did the first time and synced up the position of the first customer to the door when doing the cut.