(If you want to watch the video go to The Slanted Lens on YouTube!)
Let’s look at nine camera moves that will improve your cinematic and your doc style shooting. We’ve got the C-PAN Arm here from 9.Solutions. 
The C-PAN Arm II is going to help us to look at nine different camera moves to improve our B-roll, improve our cinematic and our doc style shooting. 
I’ve got Cody here with me from Blacksmith Outlaw. He’s going to show us how to do… Outlaw Blacksmith. From Outlaw Blacksmith. We’re going to look at a few camera moves, aren’t we? Yeah!
The reason we’re using the C-PAN Arm II is because it gives us great slider shots. It gives us parallax shots that work around the product, and also a jib arm type look.
We get all those different options with one device. That’s why I’ve chosen that C-PAN Arm II today. The C-PAN Arm II is carbon fiber, which means it’s lighter weight and easier to carry. Which makes it a much easier device to use, because you can carry it on location.
Camera moves are an integral part of any type of a cinematic experience. Just as you have emotion with light, you have emotion with actors, you also have emotion with camera moves. Let’s look at each one of these camera moves and just see what emotion it evokes. 
Let’s talk about it and see how you can use it to communicate, the camera move communicates. So let’s look at these nine different moves and see exactly what they communicate.
We’re going to be using anamorphic lenses from Sirui, the Sirui Venus. We’ve got a 35 millimeter and a 70 millimeter. Anamorphics are just a wonderful lens, because what they do is they squeeze your image, and then when you de squeeze it, you get this beautiful, wide cinematic look. A 1.6x, it’s just a beautiful look. It also gives us this kind of beautiful oval bokeh. 
And also your lens kind of breathes a little bit. It’s just an old school way to shoot those horizontal, as you see, those horizontal type flares in the camera that looks awesome. That’s a look, that’s an anamorphic look, and it certainly looks cinematic. So we’re going to use that today to help us show our cinematic camera moves.
Our first camera move is a parallax move. It moves around our subject matter, but it keeps the subject right in the middle. So as we move around from right to left. We keep that subject matter right in the middle, and it keeps us focused on it the whole way. We’re not losing it. It is meant to keep the viewer’s attention on the subject matter. It’s meant to keep them looking at exactly what we want them to see. So we can focus on the knife as we pivot around to be able to see this is our finished product. This is what I make. 
We can do it on Cody’s face, if we want to just see his eyes and just say, here’s the Blacksmith. Just a great way for us to romance the person. It’s also emotionally a great way to look at a person and what they’re thinking and what’s going on. If you do it slow, it just has a feeling of what’s really going on inside their mind. If you do it fast, it’s now like there’s something frenetic starting to happen in this person’s head, around them, something’s going on. So that first move, that parallax is really important. Things in the foreground will move at different distance, at different speeds, as things in the background. And it gives you a difference, that difference helps create a dynamic shot. But this shot is really focused on a person, a thing, and communicating about that person or that thing.
So this move is a horizontal slider move. This is a classic move. It’s a straight across move. We’re going to go right across the subject matter here. It’s a great way to introduce an environment. It’s a great way to look at a process. It just moves straight across. It works best if you have things in the foreground that are going to pass at different speeds. 
And it allows the mood be a lot more rich, a lot more dynamic, but it just, it just goes across. It’s going to follow our movement straight across. It’s not going to curve like a parallax. It’s just going to go straight across. This is very calm. It’s kind of at rest. This type of move just moves in and introduces subject matter, introduces people, introduces the environment. Just very much an introductory type shot, very calm, very smooth.
So this is a flyover shot. A flyover shot is really, it’s like a slider shot going across the plane, but it’s overhead. It’s really a great way if you’re going to lay out a book, you’re going to lay out a map, it can be a point of view of the actor looking down at the table. 
It gives you that point of view so you see exactly what they’re seeing. Just an interesting way to introduce things, to be able to see. An overhead shot gives you a perspective that is a little different than what you’re used to. It really brings you into the process, rather than outside looking at the process. So that’s really what an overhead shot does. 
It gives you the ability to do a POV like the person and see what they’re looking at, and it brings you into that process. And it’s a lot more interesting than just a locked off shot, because it’s just slowly going across. You can see things they lay out, the map. You can see this is grinding, just kind of slowly go across. And it makes that, that whole visual, much more interesting to look at.
So this is a push in. The push in emotionally has so many different uses. It truly does. If it’s a slow push in on someone’s face, you start to feel like there’s something about to happen. Depending on the performance, the performance always adds to movement. 
That performance can give you a sense that they’re falling into themselves, that they’re having a difficult time, that they’re worried about something that’s going to happen. If it’s a fast push in it can be about surprise. Something caught them off guard. It’s been something that they’re just startled by. You want to push in really fast. Use it all the time in horror films. 
You’re going to push in fast on the face when something happens. It’s almost like a jump scare when you do that. So a push in just has a lot of different emotional impact. It’s a great way to just simply slide in on something like we have the forge going here to get in closer to see it. 
But there are a lot of different emotional ways you can use a push in. So whether it’s fast or slow, when you combine that with a performance or with the things that are going on in the scene, it really changes exactly what it means emotionally to the viewer.
So a pullback shot could change the direction of the entire scene. If the camera pulls back very quickly and the person hands the divorce papers, then it just all of a sudden changed exactly what was going on. Or as the camera goes out slowly, it starts to show us the immensity of what the actor has to overcome. They’re walking into the desert and you see sand going on forever and ever. 
The camera just slowly pulls back and it just shows everything that they have to overcome and how difficult it’s going to be for them. Or as it pulls back, it could be a way of leaving your actor, leaving them, orphaning them, like pulling away and just a withdrawing from the actor and leaving them on their own and they just feel lost or left behind. 
You see this a lot of times, the car pulls away and the camera just slowly pulls away. It’s the movement of the car, but it really is the fact that the people in the car are leaving the actor behind, leaving the character behind. So pull back shot has a lot of different ways to communicate. It helps you to create the emotion of the moment and pull it, withdraw it. And that’s kind of the means, the reason for a pullback shot.
So this move is just a crane shot, very simple. It’s a jib arm or a crane. It just gives you the ability to come off from the floor, come off from someone’s shoes, come up to a higher shot, change the point of view, change the kind of the perspective of what you’re looking at. So it’s just a simple move. 
It just adds a lot of interest as you come up and over, or if you come up, just straight up into something that’s on the table, it makes it really an interesting shot. If someone’s doing something under the table, and they’re like, passing something under the table, they’ve got a card in their sleeve. And as the camera comes up, then we come up to the game, and we just show that there’s something else going on. 
So it’s a way to kind of reveal something else that’s going on in the scene. It’s just a simple slide up, not a lot of movement to it, just from up, from low to up, and it just changes the scene, or it gives you more information than you would have had before.
So this is a jib arm that has a parallax move to it. So as the jib arm goes up and down, it’s going to keep whatever is in the middle, it’s going to keep it centered. So in this case, I have the anvil in the middle as he starts to hammer on the knife. 
I come from low up to actually, it went from high on the anvil, went down low to the anvil still in the shot. But I go from being just on the metal to showing the blacksmith hammering from that low angle. 
So it’s a really interesting angle change. You could ramp this as you ramp down to the bottom. It would be really cool to see this, you go down, reveal him hammering from that low angle. 
It looks really interesting. So it’s a parallax move with a jib arm.
This camera move is an outward curve. And what an outward curve is, is that as your camera moves across the subject matter, it moves out, it looks away. So it’s a way to show a longer, more epic shot with a slider. 
So you get a long arch that goes way across the frame, and that just gives you a much broader view. It’s great for showing just these huge vistas. 
A car, if you want to be able to see the car, it goes all the way across the car. So really, it makes the economy of your slider much better. 
It’s giving you much more than the 48 inches of your slider. It’s going to give you a move that’s more, it’s much larger than that. It looks and feels more like six or eight feet, really, much longer. 
So that’s an outward curve. It really gives you the way to show an epic shot.
This move is a parallax move with a Dutch angle. And the reason I love this move is because I can, with this long format, I can work Cody in from the side. I can work the product in the front, and it just allows me to romance both of those in the frame in a horizontal way. 
So it moves across and up to the person. So it’s a way to change the angle to make something really interesting or different emotionally. Anytime you use a Dutch angle it becomes emotionally disturbing a little bit. The camera is off. It means that the character is off. It means the situation is off. It means something is not quite right when you use that Dutch angle. And so that just gives us a way to create that emotion on set when we use that Dutch angle with a parallax. 
The parallax is keeping the knife in the middle of the frame, but the Dutch angle is sweeping up to show Cody. In this case, we’re just using it purely as a visual experience. So I see the knife and Cody. But if you’re using it in cinematic kind of application, it really means something is off, something is different, something is lacking.
All right, let’s wrap this up. Camera moves really are a fundamental part of the video process, because it creates emotion. It creates communication with your viewer. It really is a way for you to not just have a narrative through the actor or through the dialog, but the camera reinforces those things. Especially when you’re shooting B-roll. An interesting B-roll for any kind of a documentary piece. B-roll that you’re doing for any kind of a social media piece. It really becomes a way to communicate to your viewer. You see it all the time. You see it on TikTok. The camera punches in. They push a camera in when the person goes “ahhhh”. It’s a way to communicate to the audience through the use of a camera move.
So there’s a look at nine different camera moves. The reason I like using the 9.Solutions C-PAN Arm II is because it is lightweight carbon fiber and it does all those different camera moves. Camera moves are about emotion. They help to really emphasize what your actor is showing you, what your documentary wants to communicate, what your social media piece is doing. Camera moves communicate. Learn how to use camera moves to communicate, because it’s going to make your doc style and cinema work much stronger. So there’s a look at camera moves using that 9.Solutions C-PAN Arm II. So keep those cameras rollin’ and keep on clickin’!
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