A lot of the newer dirsctor's "artsy" shots are annoying to me...especially the jittery film, in and out of focus, useless multiple split second cuts that they tend to do (example- Man on Fire went from great to good in my rating because it was filmed annoyingly...it gave my wife a headache).
Yeah. It is a stupid phenomenon that happened right about the time that the ability to color correct digitally came about. Also, when newer camera rigs come out some guys just want to take the thing to the extreme and see the bigest thing it can do instead of having the camera moves service the story. And some directors let their DP decide how to move the camera, and sometimes when you let those guys loose they are just doing stuff to test new gear, or to do shots they have always wanted to do instead of telling the story. The really great directors are the guys telling the DP's what they want, and not the other way around. I am all for great cameras moves, but sometimes a really great standalone camera move can really take you out of the scene. It looks good when you see it by yourself, but bad when you edit it in to a scene.
The guy I think who really knows how to move a camera, and he just has it, is John McTierrnan (Die Hard 1 and 3). If you watch Die Hard 3, it really looks like it is impromptu and documentary when it is all planned, and it does nothing but serve the story. The camera only moves from one place to another to get to the point of the story. In fact, I was listening to his commentary on DH3, and he talked about it for the first time. He said that most directors would just make a cut from one point to the other. But he wanted to do as little cuts as he could, so he figured the best way to show the audience what he wanted to show was just move the camera from point A to point B, and that way the audience has no choice but to be focused on what he wanted them to be. And, what is most important, it isn't done annoyingly as NYPD Blue is. That is some of the most annoying camera work I have ever seen.
Spielberg is also another guy who just knows how to move a camera (although I have never liked anything he has done with Janusz Kaminski (His standard DP now). Any film I see with that artsy fartsy for no point B/S color timing or editing I don't even watch anymore. It is too distracting, and the Simpson's Star wipe phenomenon.
And that stupid machine gun editing. Honeslty I thought that would have been gone now. Started with MTV, and there was a point to it in a music video. You only have 2 or three minutes to tell a story, and you are doing the edits a lot of time to the tempo of the song. If you look at McTiernan's stuff, even when he has fast edits, he moves the camera to show you what is important in the story at that time and it works as you are getting all the info, even if it is being machine gunned. But some directors shoot a lotof coverage as they don't have a focus on the scene of what is important, and just figure they will find that in the editing room. Then when they get there, they just start editing everything they shot together hoping it will add dramatics. Good directors have a plan and know what they want to focus on on any given moment. That is why directors like Spielberg and McTiernan come in on time and ususally under budget. They aren't experimenting while shooting. They know what they want, and they know what to focus on. Usually stuff shot with directors that are like that edit together easier as you can just see what they are doing in the footage.
I have a friend who shot something, and he didn't storyboard it. Well, he did, but only half assed. It just wasn't coming together in the edit. So I asked him if I could see his storyboards and I saw what he was going for, but he deviated from it a lot on set. The storyboard showed focus on what he wanted you to see, but he got on set and started shooting other things that looked cool as a seperate cut, but totally lost all of the focus that he wanted. So I told him to leave for two hours so I could go through all the raw footage and then did an edit based on the storyboards only. Since he shot a lot of extraneous stuff, I had to use stuff hat he shot for later in the scene earlier an vice versa, and when he came back he was shocked. It was something I had been trying to hammer into him for a while and he didn't get it till just then. The other thing I remember doing now is that, during the shoot, he really went off at one point with the actor doing something, and a stupid camera move. I just looked at the scene storyboarded, and it was just supposed to be the actor waking up and looking out the window and realizing it is morning and the sun was hot, and all I did was look for a shot when he was setting up his tripod the wrong way shooting out the window. I took a few seconds when no one was walking in front of the camera and took out a bunch of stuff and just edited in that shot as a P.O.V. So it went from a mess with machine gun editing to only a few edits and it worked.
The only film recently that I have seen that have all of these things (run and gun and wacky color timing) but it really worked was Smokin Aces as the director knew what the hell he was doing, and even though he was doing the macine gun editing, he shot all of those little shots with focus on the story, and so the shotgun editing served the story.
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