“After 11 years of shooting motion and over 30 years of shooting still images, my mind seamlessly makes the switch a hundred times a day between thinking and seeing in ‘moments in time’ or ‘time in motion’”, Gail Mooney shared yesterday in “True Convergence with the DSLR Cameras,” a great blog post from her “Journeys of a Hybrid.” Mooney speaks of how photographers new to video tend to get consumed by the technical challenges and “forget that they need to think and shoot differently when shooting video.”
This is something that I have been struggling with in my very initial steps into video and multimedia. I notice that I either shoot all stills or all motion. My mind is not only not switch seamlessly, it’s hardly switching at all. And when I am in video mode, I hardly know what I’m doing. And why should I? While I’ve been making still images for 20 years, I’ve only played around with multimedia a tiny bit over the past year. How would I know how to make a movie?
To make a movie. That’s the real challenge of photographers “moving into motion”: embracing video capture, as well as audio capture, as well as the editing these element together, or even “just” editing still images and sound into multimedia pieces. This “move making” factor might seem incredibly obvious, but I think few of us really realize this.
Maybe you realize this. But if you do, do you really realize this?
I ask because I recently finished up a 4,000-word article sharing photographers’ insights on embracing video and multimedia and, as good as the article is — I’ll share it with you when I have the PDF — I think I fail to communicate this obvious-subtle idea: Moving into motion is all about making movies, and making movies is hard.
Because of all the TV programs and movies we consume, we have a sense of how movies work, which is great. But, just as casual photographers underrate the difficulty of (consistently) making great still images, most of us have no real sense of the hard work that goes into making movies.
Mooney is currently in Australia, soon to fly back to the USA, nearing the end of her around-the-world, documentary-movie-making trip. (Check out “Opening Our Eyes” if you’re not aware of her project.) She’s been capturing stills, motion and audio, loaded down with relatively light HD-DSLR gear that is making this trip possible. But then again, no it’s not.
As Mooney says, it’s not about the gear. And it’s not even about her (critical) ability to see “moments in time” and “time in motion.” These are important, but what is most critical is that Mooney is a dedicated movie maker. She has invested literally thousands of hours over the past 11 years learning and practicing the very complex craft of making movies.
In response to a very basic question I posed to Mooney about sound editing, she quickly replied by email with this advice:
I always try to blend music and dialog or even ambient natural sound and music. I will gradually up the volume and bring it down depending on when and if the audio narrative is important and should rise above. It really is all about “feeling” and pacing. Take a look at Freedom’s Ride and “listen” to the music, nat sound and dialog. When I do it well it is very subtle and should be.
Yikes. This sounds both lucid, insightful and. . .really complex.
Mooney’s use of sound in “Freedom’s Ride” definitely is subtle, though clearly powerful, which is a hallmark of all good movie making.
So many, many elements have to come together seamlessly in even a short multimedia piece. And so making them — and longer video productions — will require learning the craft of movie making with both passionate and respect. Yes, we need to have fun. But we need to respect that we are embarking in a life-long process of learning of a skill that, arguably, makes the process of making still images seem downright simple.