Hand Held Cameras Views
Hand-held camera was a technique first used sporadically towards the last years of the silent era. Although many movie cameras produced before that period were lightweight enough to be carried by a single person, the camera shapes were too boxy and bulky to be adequately operated without some form of camera support. Further, they were often hand cranked, adding to the difficulty of hand-held shooting.
By the early 1920s, however, cameras such as the Newman-Sinclair, Eyemo, and De Vry were beginning to be created with hand-held ergonomics in mind; this was largely in order to satisfy demand from both the growing documentary field, as well as the emerging amateur market. These cameras were specifically designed to hold shorter lengths of film—usually 100 to 200 feet—and included hand-wound spring motors which could be pre-wound enough to last continuously through most or even all of a roll. Nonetheless, they saw limited use in professional filmmaking, with some early examples to be found in The Passionate Quest (1926), Quality Street (1927), and King of Kings (1927).
The emergence of the sound film had an immediate dampening effect on the use of hand-held shots due to the need for camera motors to maintain a constant film speed. The motors were far too loud to be able to record synchronized sound on set, and thus early sound films were forced to install the camera within a soundproof booth. By 1929, camera manufacturers and studios had devised shells, called blimps, to encase the camera and dampen the mechanical noise sufficiently to allow the cameras to be free of the booths. However, this came at a cost: the blimped, motorized cameras were considerably heavier. When the soon-to-be ubiquitous Mitchell Camera BNC (Blimped Newsreel Camera) emerged in 1934, it weighed in at 135 lb; this clearly precluded any hand-held usage. The aesthetic style of films from this period thus reflected their available technology, and hand-held shots were for the most part avoided.
Hand-held shots required use of the smaller hand-wound spring-work cameras, which were too loud to be practical for any shots requiring synchronized (sync) sound, and held less footage than studio cameras. The spring-wound cameras were also not accurate enough speed-wise to guarantee perfect sync speed, which led to many of them having motors installed (the additional sound being negligible). Thus, these cameras could not be used for much in the way of dialogue.
Hand Held Cameras Images
