Hi All,

I have over a period of several years developed a course in camera work called Hollywood Camera Work: The Master Course in High-End Blocking & Staging.

As a director, I came from high-budget music videos, and when I decided to turn to narrative filmmaking, I was frustrated at my own blocking skills. So I spent over 5,000 hours exclusively training blocking and creating a complete language of camera work, because none existed. I felt that others would benefit enormously from this very large collection of techniques I developed, and decided to turn it into a course.

The course teaches high-end camera work in 3D with almost a thousand animations, is 9 hours long, and covers probably 99% of all camera work you'll ever see in a film.

Creating this course has taken a tremendous effort, but I strongly feel that some better tools for learning directing are needed.

Please check it out at http://www.hollywoodcamerawork.us. There is about 1/2 hour of free chapters in the Sample Clips section.

Thanks,

Per Holmes

hey, that looks great. 3d modeling is a great teaching tool.

You mention that nothing existed for teaching blocking. You should check out "Grammar of film language" It's a book that's been around since the 1970s and is six or seven hundred pages of shot/actor blocking for different circumstances--99% of it is still relevant today. For, less than twenty bucks, it's a great book to have. You can use it when storyboarding, blocking, or even to have on set as a reference in case you run into any problems.

Dear Joren,

Thank you for looking at the website!

Oh yes, I have that book, bought it many years ago. But even though it looks immense with all the diagrams, it actually doesn't cover that much ground, and does it in no particular order.

But the bigger problem with that book, and other books in general, is that they lean on storyboarding, which for most camera work is not a good blocking method. Storyboarding is inherently sequential, which means that every time something new happens, we set up another shot, meaning that the scene becomes very choppy, is filled with line-problems, takes far too long to shoot, and excludes all techniques that can't be drawn in a storyboard. This way, a scene gets covered in 20 cameras that don't stick together. But it's by far the best solution for sequential scenes like chases.

One of the points in my course is to block in parallel, and treat the blocking as if it's a multi-camera shoot, where the cameras are heavily designed to work together, even though we'll naturally shoot one camera at a time. This creates extremely cohesive and elegant blocking, often in far fewer cameras. This is of course faster to shoot, but it also allows the actors to do longer takes, and managing the line becomes much easier to figure out, even for extremely complex scenes. It also allows you to get far more mileage from each camera, and more production-value in a shorter period of time.

But again, thanks for taking a look...

All the best,

Per Holmes