The Importance of Camera Movement in Filmmaking

Dozens of different disciplines lend their hands to the making of a movie. From makeup artists to sound technicians, everyone on set makes their own mark on the finished project. How are the folks behind the camera using their position? How does camera movement affect our experience of the movie? Let’s look at the importance of camera movement in filmmaking and how they play with our eyes.
Guiding the Eyes
When a scene is full of actors, furniture, and props, it’s up to the camera to tell us where to look. A slow pan around a character’s empty bedroom lets us look leisurely upon aspects of their life. If one character is concealing a weapon from another, a zoom-in or clever angle can show the audience the weapon without showing the other character. Alfred Hitchcock employed this technique in Psycho, his most famous film. As Norman Bates cleans up the motel bathroom after Marion Crane’s murder, the camera lingers on the stolen $40,000 on her nightstand.
Concealing Action
From 1934 to 1968, the Hays Code dictated what Hollywood filmmakers could and couldn’t show their audience. Explicit scenes of sex and violence were prohibited, but those elements often contribute to a movie’s narrative. So when a director wanted to show two characters in an intimate situation, for example, they’d cleverly move the camera away and let the characters have their privacy. At the end of Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, the two main characters finally get married. However, on their wedding night, the camera only allows the audience to see a faint silhouette through the window before the lights snap off.
Drawing the Viewer In
Sometimes, clever camera angles and shots pull the audience right into the action or emotion of the movie. Take Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, for example. A lightning-fast dolly zoom shot, pulling the camera sharply back as it zooms in, creates anxiety in the audience as we see blood in the water. Dolly zooms, overhead views, and slow tracking shots bring us into the action of the movie. We follow characters as they walk, see the emotion on their faces in close-ups, and feel the turbulence in their lives as the camera spins around and around.
Next time you have a movie night, pay extra attention to how the camera moves. The cinematographer holds the audience’s hand and guides them to what they need to see, often so smoothly it’s practically unnoticeable. But when you feel yourself pulled directly into the story, that’s filmmaking in action. The importance of camera movement in filmmaking can’t be understated; the director of photography is just as much an artist as everyone else on set.