Why do people gripe about not understanding action movies?

[Vehrec]

It would seem that as the possibility to make more complex films in a visual sense continues to increase, the ability of the audience to follow them has suffered in return. I for one, am more than familiar with those who claim that the most recent Star Trek movie was too fast, too action packed and gave them headaches because they needed more downtime to absorb it. I mostly put this and other Star Trek fans with similar complaints down to radically different expectations of what would be forthcoming. That, and the mysterious inability of some people to understand shakeycam footage. I for one, look through such an awkward viewpoint every day, equally prone to swinging around to focus on distant or nearby objects. I believe it's known as an eye.

So today, I was rather shocked to read someone claiming similar things about the beginning of Revenge of the Sith. That's right, someone was griping that the battle of Coruscant had too many ships, too much confusion, and was too hard to follow.

What's the deal? Why does a little shakeycam throw these people off so much? Why do six ships onscreen overwhelm their senses? Were they just used to the special effects budget being low for so many years that now they really have been overwhelmed? Do they have a low threshold for stimulation? Or are they just grasping onto anything to love what is familiar and hate that which is strange and different?

[Ziggy Stardust]

With reference to the shakeycam style of action, I just don't like it. It's not that I find it confusing or whatever, I just think it's irritating. It can be used well, certainly, but when I go to an action movie I want to SEE the god-damned action, and a lot of the time the shakeycam just shows the effects of the action, and not the action itself. The reason the first Matrix movie is so cool is that you see the entire fight clearly. Shakeycam is cool for emulating a certain effect, but it is overused.

In any case, I do find it irritating when people say they don't "understand" action movies. What the fuck is there to understand? When I went to see Transformers 2, I wasn't expecting cinematic gold, I was expecting a movie with a hot chick and fifty foot robots beating the living shit out of each other, and that is exactly what I got.

[Starglider]

I for one, look through such an awkward viewpoint every day, equally prone to swinging around to focus on distant or nearby objects. I believe it's known as an eye.

Human vision is stabilised via feedback from the vestibular and prioperceptive systems; i.e. your ability to sense the movement and orientation of your head and body. A shaking or swaying viewpoint without corresponding body motion can produce confusion and, in many people, motion sickness. Shakeycam in particular is good as a very specific effect; conveying the confusion that characters in the film are experiencing. However numerous third-rate film-makers have overused it in failed attempts to impart energy and excitement to their footage. Good direction does not require such crutches.

[neoolong]

What's the deal? Why does a little shakeycam throw these people off so much? Why do six ships onscreen overwhelm their senses?

It's usually not just shakeycam. It's shakeycam mixed with extremely quick cuts with the camera set really close to the action. You can do one or two, but all three can make it hard to tell what the action is. It's also not necessarily that you can't follow what's going on, but that it shouldn't be a big chore to be able to follow a fight scene. Watching a fight between Jet Li and some other martial arts guy should be about their near-superhuman skills, not the dynamicism of the camera so that you're lucky if you can tell what's going on.

Cutting around the actors is only if you're trying to hide that it's not really the actors. That's less the case in today's action movies.

Space battles have less of this problem, and a lot of the movement from the one in Revenge of the Sith, from what I recall, was as background, with the focus on Anakin's and Obi-wan's starfighters. The camera wasn't set to close to them, I don't think.

"One of the things I really believe is that we shouldn’t try and make everything feel perfectly staged. I’m always saying to my crew, I want to feel like we were lucky to catch a glimpse of some crazy piece of action. I don’t want it to feel like a movie, where everything is perfectly presented to the audience." - Dan Bradley (2nd Unit Director - Quantum of Solace)

Personally, I think that's the wrong type of attitude to have. I'm not saying that moving the camera can't be effective, the openining beach scene of Saving Private Ryan showed that, but shakeycam to make it specifically hard to see the action is dumb. Though in Quantum of Solace it was more cutting too quickly.

That's the thing that people complain about I think.

[Zixinus]

I have to second all of the above: shakeycam is irritating and overused. If you have the budget and crew to pull of some really interesting and amazing fighting scenes, then let's see it. If you use shakycam to hide the lameness of your actors and/or the action, then you made wrong action to begin with, no matter what you do.
But it's really inexcusable when you have good action but you can't tell.

That, and the mysterious inability of some people to understand shakeycam footage. I for one, look through such an awkward viewpoint every day, equally prone to swinging around to focus on distant or nearby objects. I believe it's known as an eye.

I don’t want it to feel like a movie, where everything is perfectly presented to the audience.

Isn't that the point of watching a movie?

[Sarevok]

I am not an augmented cyborg. My primitive eyes can not see what happens onscreen with shaky cam. Even with a pause on my poor 14 inch laptop screen all I see is blurry shapes because the camera was violently shaking so much. In movies like Quantum of Solace or Transformers I can not even tell who is fighting who. I prefer stable shots like Lord of the Rings where I can admire the combatants and follow their moves carefully. This is why I dislike shaky cam.

[General Zod]

Star Trek's shakycam use pissed me off. While I liked the movie the abuse of shakycam didn't mean it moved too fast, it came off as disjointed at times and as a result hard to keep track of where things were. This wasn't very consistent either. There's absolutely zero reason a Star Trek movie should have to use shakycam, and if I go see a movie I don't want to feel claustrophobic because the director doesn't want to show us more than a tiny portion of the scene at once.

[Coyote]

Shakeycam is okay in limited doses, but yeah, using it all the time, or to extremes, is like using it to cover the notion that nothing important is actually happening. But simulating actual "combat-vision" is hard. I was acutely aware of the effects of adrenaline on vision during the 2004 Fallujah battle-- you get incredibly focused, clear vision on what appears to be the most relevant threat at the time, and my peripheral vision was went "shaky/blurry". Then, when some RPGs went off back down the street we'd just driven (and our eventual escape route, oops) it was like I unfocused from the street ahead of us, where the bullets were coming from, and checked down the street and became acutely aware of the details where the explosions were.

Then, more shooting came from down the original street, and then from an alley to our left, and so I focused back on those. Each time it was the same: unfocus; blur quickly to the next threat, refocus sharply on that. The only tiem I could probably call something "shakycam" vision was moving from behind the armored HUMVEE to a brick wall, where I could focus in anything coming around the alley. Once there, and I'd stopped running and settled in, everything went back to solidity. Others focused on the original street with the shooting, and others forcused back on covering our escape route.

The whole time, it was amazing how clear, sharp, and focused the "threat area" was in my vision. It was, in fact, almost Zen-like in its serenity. Hearing, everything honed on that area. My intellectual mind told me not to worry about the other threat areas because the other guys had them covered; that was the extent of the higher intellect. The rest went by instinct and training.

I can see why shakycam is used to simulate the battle environment-- it is hard to really put these effects to camera without... Nerfing it, I guess. Making it seem cheap, contrived. I've seen it done in some movies before and thinking "yeah, it's like that" but realizing that to most people it would seme more confusing, because they're trying to to see everything on the screen and the peripheral indistinction would "get in the way".

So it is both full of confusion (if you're trying to see the big picture) and full of clarity; you would, as a literary device, require multiple, staccato cuts to different points of view if you're trying to follow the big picture. Or, if you're following the pov of one character, it would be sharp, clear focus on one thing while letting lesser things slide. But Hollywood can only go so far making "combat vision" and showing combat scenes, because they have to balance it all with literary devices to make the story coherent. "Saving Private Ryan", "Band of Brothers", and "Blackhawk Down" have all done well, but they're still constrained by certain Hollywood needs to organize the flow of events so the audience isn't totally out of the loop.

Good action will strain the ability to comprehend the combat itself, but otherwise, most "action movie" plots don't ask for a lot of "comprehension" or work from the audience. You just munch your popcorn, watch the explosions, and then you and the hero get to see some nice boobs at some point before the final asskicking.

[salm]

I can see why shakycam is used to simulate the battle environment-- it is hard to really put these effects to camera without... Nerfing it, I guess. Making it seem cheap, contrived. I've seen it done in some movies before and thinking "yeah, it's like that" but realizing that to most people it would seme more confusing, because they're trying to to see everything on the screen and the peripheral indistinction would "get in the way".

The thing why shaky cam works good for people without combat experience is that they´re used to a "natural" shaky cam when seeing combat. After all when you see combat on the news on TV you see it recorded by some guy on the ground running around with a camera.
Sometimes "being" realistic and "seeming" realistic are totally different. And in a movie "seeming" is more important than "being".

That said, i find the overuse of shaky cam pretty annoying. It works very good if it´s used reasonably, though.

[Sarevok]

I liked Battlestar Galacticas appropriate use of shakey cam. It was extremely well done. Zooming into a shio FTLing in, tracking an exploding Raider, brief glimpses of Centurions cresting a ridge felt like an old style war documentary. Yet instead of Galacticas amazing war scenes most film makers sink to the jarring and nauseating level of fake viral videos shot with cellphones. I wish the filmmakers themselves watched some of the amazing preserved color scenes from ww 2 or vietnam war. It does not look like hollywood at all. The enemy is often obscured but you could see the battle that was going on clearly.

[Vehrec]

I am not an augmented cyborg. My primitive eyes can not see what happens onscreen with shaky cam. Even with a pause on my poor 14 inch laptop screen all I see is blurry shapes because the camera was violently shaking so much. In movies like Quantum of Solace or Transformers I can not even tell who is fighting who. I prefer stable shots like Lord of the Rings where I can admire the combatants and follow their moves carefully. This is why I dislike shaky cam.

to be fair, Transformers suffers mostly from having largely similar aliens who are difficult tot tell apart that just compound the issues of who is fighting who. I imagine that Quantum of Solace had two white men in suits fighting each other, am I right? So it would also fall into the category of similar opponents fighting each other from unflattering angles?

Star Trek's shakycam use pissed me off. While I liked the movie the abuse of shakycam didn't mean it moved too fast, it came off as disjointed at times and as a result hard to keep track of where things were. This wasn't very consistent either. There's absolutely zero reason a Star Trek movie should have to use shakycam, and if I go see a movie I don't want to feel claustrophobic because the director doesn't want to show us more than a tiny portion of the scene at once.

Claustrophobia? Man, now I'm even more confused. How the hell do you get claustrophobic because of extreme close ups?

Good action will strain the ability to comprehend the combat itself, but otherwise, most "action movie" plots don't ask for a lot of "comprehension" or work from the audience. You just munch your popcorn, watch the explosions, and then you and the hero get to see some nice boobs at some point before the final asskicking.

Let's be fair, some of the very hardcore shakeycam haters(the ones who claim too much is going on in Star Wars for instance) are also people who take these things a little too seriously and need to recite the MST3k mantra a few times every day. I somehow doubt they allow themselves to enjoy the boobs and explosions. Or anything for that matter.

I liked Battlestar Galacticas appropriate use of shakey cam. It was extremely well done. Zooming into a shio FTLing in, tracking an exploding Raider, brief glimpses of Centurions cresting a ridge felt like an old style war documentary. Yet instead of Galacticas amazing war scenes most film makers sink to the jarring and nauseating level of fake viral videos shot with cellphones. I wish the filmmakers themselves watched some of the amazing preserved color scenes from ww 2 or vietnam war. It does not look like hollywood at all. The enemy is often obscured but you could see the battle that was going on clearly.

The needs of documentaries and the needs of dramatic film are often different. BSG footage was often fixed on an area before any jumps-in began, and managed to zoom in on them before they were finished for instance. Even if there was a real camera pointed in that direction, who but a robot would be on it 24/7 ready to zoom in on a suddenly dramatically appropriate ship? From our point of view as the audience, it's perfectly logical to always focus on plot appropriate vessels, but I hardly think the war footage does the same.

[General Zod]

Claustrophobia? Man, now I'm even more confused. How the hell do you get claustrophobic because of extreme close ups?

Because the close-ups tend to make it seem that they're fighting in a much smaller and more confined area than they really are? I mean fuck that, I want to see the whole fight, not disjointed segments because the directors don't have a wide-angle lens.

[Big Phil]

I'm not saying that moving the camera can't be effective, the openining beach scene of Saving Private Ryan showed that, but shakeycam to make it specifically hard to see the action is dumb. Though in Quantum of Solace it was more cutting too quickly.

Shakeycam makes a lot of sense in war movies. Contrast Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers' combat scenes (both using shakeycam) with We Were Soldiers or Platoon (no shakeycam). The first two feel very gritty and real, like you're almost there, while the last two dissociate you from the action.

Agree with you otherwise, however, that shakeycam is overused and can be annoying and nauseating if the director is a douche.

[Stark]

Poor editing creates no sense of space, position, order or sequence. When events are shown without any idea of where they are, what order they're happening or how they relate to each other - or even what exactly is happening - it's just random information. This happens a lot in modern 'action' movies (ps titty movies). Older action films with more traditional direction don't have these problems; even in movies like Predator the action at a location has a clear narrative and space to it instead of HERE IS A PUNCH TO THE CHEST and CLOSE UP ON EYE and PANTING WOMAN and RED BLUR.

Amusingly this form of direction also become common in comicbooks in a certain period; I remember reading Dreamwave comics where a whole fight would be two panels of a fist-shaped object hitting something and then it'd cut away to somewhere else. INFORMATIVE!

Shakycam in no way makes me feel like I'm anywhere but watching a movie. It either works or doesn't (which is generally down to the director) but I don't feel any versimilitude from it at all. I actually consider it extraordinarily lazy unless it really fits with the rest of the direction. 'I want to make the audience feel like things are chaotic... I'll break the steadicam! GENIUS'.

[aerius]

I don't have any problems with a thousand things going on on-screen at the same time, that's what the rewind button is for on my DVD player so I can watch it again & again to enjoy all the stuff they put in the scene for me to enjoy.

But shakeycam abuse is just stupid and makes the movie look low-budget. A couple moments of shakiness when a big-ass explosion goes off near the camera position is acceptable, any more than that gets stupid real fast.

Seriously, this here's an insane foot chase sequence that's well over 5 minutes long, there's maybe 3 seconds total of shakeycam in the whole scene. If some stupid hack shot the scene it would close-up cuts every 2 seconds and half of it would be in shakeycam. Which would make it look like complete shit. The way it is is the right way to do it.


Every action scene should be this fucking good.

[Edward Yee]

Watching a fight between Jet Li and some other martial arts guy should be about their near-superhuman skills, not the dynamicism of the camera so that you're lucky if you can tell what's going on.

Cutting around the actors is only if you're trying to hide that it's not really the actors. That's less the case in today's action movies.

Or, alternately, trying to hide that the actors just aren't that good at fight scenes. Just look at how differently Jet Li vs. Donnie Yen (read: the only two trained martial artists in the whole film) was filmed from the rest of the fight scenes in Hero.

[Stark]

I don't have any problems with a thousand things going on on-screen at the same time, that's what the rewind button is for on my DVD player so I can watch it again & again to enjoy all the stuff they put in the scene for me to enjoy.

That's fine, but having to rewatch a section to understand what's going on = director fails. Nobody cares about 'a thousand things'; people care about out-of-focus blurry things in no real place occurring with little connection. Watch a Uwe Boll movie; who even knows if those people are in the same fucking room?

[aerius]

I watched a Uwe Boll movie once, the only thing I remember is Kristanna Loken's titties. She has nice tits.

[Stark]

Your being a cretin doesn't tell us anything about editing and coherency, unfortunately.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned nBSG taking shakycam so far that during a conversation between two people in the same room, they can go 30 seconds without a single focused shot of either participants face. This adds versimilitude if you're a farsighted quadriplegic.

[Uraniun235]

Your being a cretin doesn't tell us anything about editing and coherency, unfortunately.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned nBSG taking shakycam so far that during a conversation between two people in the same room, they can go 30 seconds without a single focused shot of either participants face. This adds versimilitude if you're a farsighted quadriplegic.

I've heard "like it was from a documentary" thrown about sometimes, but I'd really have to question the producers "what documentary have you seen with such shockingly incompetent camera work, and why would you want to emulate that?"

Although I now can't help but wonder, are there documentaries where the director is so cretinous as to actually try to deliberately inject a bit of shakeycam?

[Stark]

Sure; in the 80s documentaries in Africa etc were often shot from moving vehicles (and had wobble everywhere) or from crap tripods or handhelds. So they're emulating the feel of 30 year old documentaries.

[Shogoki]

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned nBSG taking shakycam so far that during a conversation between two people in the same room, they can go 30 seconds without a single focused shot of either participants face. This adds versimilitude if you're a farsighted quadriplegic.

I think The Bourne Ultimatum did it first. There's a scene he meets with the brother of his girlfriend from the first film, and they sit down in a quiet dark room, drinking tea and talking, but all you can see is one of their huge mugs at a time up close and out of focus shaking like they're in the middle of an earthquake. It just crossed the line from overused effect into horrible cinematography. It's the last move I've walked out of, it was just too fucking annoying.

[tim31]

As much as people like to hang shit on Cloverfield, the camerawork in that was exactly as intended; it just wasn't as original as a lot of people seemed to think, what with Blair Witch Project pulling off the same thing seven years beforehand.

[General Zod]

As much as people like to hang shit on Cloverfield, the camerawork in that was exactly as intended; it just wasn't as original as a lot of people seemed to think, what with Blair Witch Project pulling off the same thing seven years beforehand.

Wait, people actually think Cloverfield was original? I seem to remember a lot of comparisons to Blair Witch when it first came out.

[tim31]

The defenders of the film, Zod. The defenders.