◡◶▿ HOME07 | Frame work
🖼️ The soft tripod. Cutting your home life to size. Maya Deren. Home movie conference. | Renovating the Home Motion Picture Week 7
Hello, you! Today, we’re going to talk about how to steady or unsteady your home movie camera: how to reframe your life and destabilise your gran.
But first, as is tradition, let’s briefly recap last week’s lesson on the phenomenology of the pinch zoom. We learned how:
The home movie is the only genre where you’re allowed to touch the buttons for fun.
The pinch zoom puts the filmmaker in a kind of ersatz touching distance to her subject.
By combining the fingerprint and the finger gait, the filmmaker’s gesture becomes a multi-dimensional work of art - before you even see what she zoomed on.
The prevalence of the pinch zoom suggests the human being - and its cinematic grammar - is evolving fast!
It was a long lesson. But a valuable one, I think. Do read and share it if you can.
Missed a week? Joined late? Don’t worry about reading these lessons out of order. Each functions independently. They are sent in a sensible sequence but hardly reliant on it.
This week’s lesson? A bit shorter and simpler. In a single micro-essay, consisting mostly of bullet points, we’ll cover some common home movie framing methods. Including how:
🍰 Since the home movie is a slice of your life, you’d better slice carefully.
🏡 The home movie genre is framed by homey themes - but the filmmaker must frame the actual shots herself.
🔭 Common framing methods range from the handheld to the window ledge-leaned to the hubris of the consumer-grade tripod.
🫨 Each method has its quirks and flaws - thank goodness!
Could your students use this class? Of course, they could. Your dad? For sure. Send it on. And don’t forget Gran.
Common home movie framing methods (spatial)
See also: Common home movie framing methods (temporal)
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
The structure of the built “home” provides a frame through which the home movie may be defined, pursued, and understood. The bounds of the imaginary home fence off certain urges, intimacies, and humours.
But “home” is just a metaphor. You can make a home movie anywhere!
On the other hand, there is nothing imaginary about the need to find a spatial and temporal frame for your home movie. Not when your finger is hovering over the Record button. The home movie is a slice of your life; a very thinly shaved slice, but a slice all the same. Better slice carefully.
Common home movie spatial framing methods include, in order of physical instability, and with sundry notes on their faults and characteristics:
The handheld point-and-tap.
One hand or two.
Stability further compromised by:
occasional need to use nose or third-party finger to tap Record.
the jolt of thumb and forefinger impacting the device for a mid-take pinch zoom.
Mistakes in handheld framing - particularly on a lightweight device - tend to be evasive or indefinite. They get smooshed in with all the good stuff.
The selfie stick may belong to this category or #2 below, depending on the filmmaker’s disposition and athletic prowess.
The human tripod.
“no tripod has yet been built which is as miraculously versatile in movement as the complex system of supports, joints, muscles and nerves which is the human body” - Maya Deren.
The camera becomes one with the filmmaker, rather than an inconvenience best kept at arm’s length (see #1).
Well-suited to the Super 8 camera. The need to hold down the Record trigger throughout filming interlocks the mechanisms of the camera and its human. Creating a toe-to-lens filmmaking machine. A mecha-biomechanics of cinematography.
The improvised stand.
The cameraphone on a table, propped on or in a mug, in a shirt pocket.
(Inadvertently?) gives the stable objects of the home a point of view; a turn with the camera.
Characterised by a perfectly still frame that fails completely when jolted or when the filmmaker’s luck expires.
Or suffers the slow droop. Particularly when a cushion, soft toy, or sleeping grandparent’s pressed thighs have been harnessed for the job. Elegant and elegiac.
Smoothish motion effects are possible, too. The Super 8 camera steadied on the lip of an open car window like a panting dog.
The webcam.
If it wasn’t for fidgeting knees and under-hanging desk drawers, the webcam might be more stable yet.
Often used to frame the user’s identity through careful curation of the frame’s apparently incidental details (swotty books; trophies; the bare toes of a sleeping lover).
The mindful home moviemaker considers also what will be left in frame when the filmmaker leaves the room, neglecting to pause the webcam.
It is difficult to make a mistake with a webcam. Zero mistakes because zero options, zero manoeuvrability. It is possible for an error to occur. A failure of clip or hinge that leaves the frame dangling. A software bug or invasion by rogue avatar.
The consumer tripod.
Approaching the limits of the home moviemaker’s humility. Acquisition of a consumer tripod suggests a level of serious amateurism. A level of serious amateurism that is beyond the genre bounds of the home movie.
The tripod seems to remove responsibility for stability from the filmmaker. So, she may attempt additional reframings with a false sense of aptitude. Achieving such effects as:
the big jolt
the overshooting pan
the ebbing and flowing zoom-in-shot (betraying its operator’s hand)
the conspicuous mid-shot re-focus.
The consumer camera tripod is also prone to systemic errors (due to cheap apparatus or untrained operator).
Often wonky.
Sometimes sinking (inadvertent tilt).
It goes without saying that the stability of the visual frame - both visually and in its other qualities - is not a matter of quality or merit. The unstable slice may be just as fruitful. The instability is fruitful in itself. A nice wonky slice, in a landscape of crumbs.
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
Re*framing* the home motion picture
It’s not a bad name for an association for “the protection and valorization of family films and private audiovisual memories” - Re-framing Home Movies.
A bit like the title of our present module, right?
Anyway, the association’s second-ever conference, Home Movie Days 2024, takes place this weekend, 13th-15th December. Online. In English! “Three days of screenings, presentations, workshops and discussions.”
Oh, how I wish I could attend! But I have a family event over the whole weekend. I’ll be making my own damn home movies!
Still, you could attend? Right? It takes place on your computer, after all.
Next week, I think we’ll delve a little deeper into the issue of framing. Take a look at some avant-garde slicing techniques. Sounds good. Okay.
Class dismissed!
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️
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