Those who like to watch fantastic or adventure films, for sure, more than once with excitement and amazement watched the shots when the hero easily soars in the air, falls like a stone from a great height or passes through the wall of a house. To create such miracles in cinematography, the so-called combined shooting has long and successfully been used.
Combined filming in cinematography
When filming films, it is often necessary to perform life-threatening scenes when an actor is about to chase across city roofs, fall from a moving car or train, or acrobatic stunts. Sometimes understudies are invited for such work. However, the capabilities of the most daring and trained stuntmen do not always correspond to the complexity of the stunts.
To the aid of the director and the operator comes special shooting, called combined.
Combined shooting is most often carried out by combining several elements in the same frame, which are previously filmed at different times and in different places. As a result, after such a combination, the most incredible special effects are obtained. The quality of the final picture and its reliability are largely determined by the peculiarities of the editing, which completes the entire work.
Special types of filming began to be widely used at the beginning of the last century, when young cinema was looking for ways to conquer the audience. Already in the 1920s, cameramen used a combination of dangerous scenes and real actors. Most often it was about the simplest video editing of different scenes in one frame. Two or three scenes were filmed from different points with time intervals, and then they were superimposed on each other. Such combination methods were quite primitive and relatively cheap.
Types of combined surveys
Freeze frame is considered one of the most elementary types of combined shooting. It allows you to capture the sudden appearance or disappearance of the hero. In this case, the movie camera is temporarily turned off, after which the actor leaves the frame or enters it. Now you can turn on the equipment and continue shooting.
There are also more expressive camera techniques. These include the perspective alignment method. For example, the director of a fairy tale movie requires one character to walk over the palm of the other. To achieve this effect, two actors are filmed at different distances from the camera.
Even more commonly used in cinematography is a technique called key projection. In this type of combined filming, the hero is placed on a special background or screen. At the time of shooting a scene, the desired moving image is projected onto this auxiliary screen.
So you can create in the pavilion the effect of movement on a car or on a train, when the picture is rapidly changing outside the window, but the vehicle is actually stationary.
Combined types of shooting are used not only in the preparation of adventure or fantasy films. They can solve a lot of minor problems in the most common feature films, saving the director from thinking through difficult scenes. Special shooting saves time and nerves of the crew.
