camera angles and length of shots

**DianeG** · September 5th, 2014, 05:22 PM

I was watching a youtube video and my cat started watching it too. He's never shown any interest in anything on tv or the computer screen before. I wondered, whats different about this one? (It was an ASMR video) and the only thing I could really think of was that the image was close to was it would be in real life from his distance, and the camera angle never changed. I always thought cats and dogs had trouble translating 2 dimensional images into 3 d ones, and thats why they rarely look at television, but maybe its the flipping of view points that is confusing.

This also reminded me of how the other day I was watching an old movie and it seemed sooooooo slow because the camera angle never changed and the shot lengths were so long. Over the years it seemed to me it sped up gradually and then really went bananas in the 90s, so much so that I'd almost feel car sick watching tv. I think it has slowed down a bit. Also there's a lot less of that weird, jittery, hand held camera, documentary or blair witch style thing these days. I hated that.

Anyway, do you thing these changes are related in any way to other social changes - a faster pace of life?

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**One beer** · September 6th, 2014, 07:05 AM

Originally Posted by DianeG

..........This also reminded me of how the other day I was watching an old movie and it seemed sooooooo slow because the camera angle never changed and the shot lengths were so long. Over the years it seemed to me it sped up gradually and then really went bananas in the 90s, so much so that I'd almost feel car sick watching tv. I think it has slowed down a bit. Also there's a lot less of that weird, jittery, hand held camera, documentary or blair witch style thing these days. I hated that.

Anyway, do you thing these changes are related in any way to other social changes - a faster pace of life?

Hi Diane, I used to work in television, though not on the editing side. Yes the pace of programs has become faster and faster over the years.

A sad fact of life is that people seem to have shorter and shorter attention spans, and I think this is because of advertising. Editors trying to produce more eye-catching adverts than the last will use more and more jump cuts etc., and directors will use more and more edgy shots - including handheld, and whip pans etc. Sound is compressed, loud and urgent. An old fashioned program with long static scenes would not hold the audiences attention anymore, and so almost all programs now have shots where the camera constantly moves, even a scene with a static talking head often uses a slow tracking shot or crabbing shot to produce some movement.

I also notice that many people now only half watch TV these days, looking at stuff on their tablets or phones at the same time.

Here in the UK, the law changed and now allows 12 minutes of adverts per hour instead of 10. This has made many programs unwatchable in my opinion. There are so many ad breaks that you lose the sense of the program, and after every break a program has to re-establish what was happening before, and I really can't be bothered.

We are lucky in the UK in that we have the BBC which has no adverts. It is funded by compulsory licence, which many people don't like, but they don't realise that they spend twice as much on the advertising on the commercial channels.

OB