Hollywood Camerawork is it worth the time? All images, unless otherwise noted. © Hollywood Camera Work, All rights reserved.

Alright, you’ve seen the online ads. You’ve begged, scraped and saved. You even spent an unbearably long, tedious day at Aunty Peg’s, just so you could hit her for the last $25 bucks to “further your filmmaking education.” You’ve got the cash in your hot little hand. You’re ready to place your order. But you hesitate — could it possibly be worth $479? Sure, you’ve seen some discussion about it on various web forums that seem to recommend it highly. But could it be that good? Some 479 clams good?

Let’s find out. It’s time for the in-depth, exhaustive, definitive review of…

Hollywood Camerawork: The Master Course In High-End Blocking And Staging by Per Holmes.

A six-DVD set, eh? Nine hours of material. That’s right. Nine hours! Hide your face in shame Peter Jackson — this is a real box set! Six discs. Nine hours. Phew! Let’s see if we can break it down a little.

Luckily the six discs (volumes) are broken into three basic stages:
Disc 1 and 2: Stationary Blocking
Disc 3 and 4: The Moving Camera
Disc 5 and 6: Staging High-End Scenes

First a quick introduction and then we’ll go through them one by one and see what they have to offer.

Introduction
Each exercise on the DVDs is based around a different scene that could be taken from any shooting script — so all blocking, staging or camera placement supports a narrative purpose. Everything is presented as 3D animations with a very clear, concise voiceover. You get to observe the setups and characters through a “God-view” perspective camera that shifts elegantly around the set to clarify the points being discussed. Through this, you observe the characters and the set as the individual shot cameras are placed around them. If the shot includes moving cameras then you see the track and the cameras moving along it.

Once the shot cameras are placed you get to look through each of those individual shot cameras (or takes) and finally you see all of those takes edited together to create the final scene (or sequence). The actors used are mannequins that move around, sit, stand, walk and turn their heads to help motivate cuts, but they don’t display any emotion, which means the ability of camerawork to imbue a scene with emotion is demonstrated in isolation.

Now let’s look at each disc in turn.

Volume I: Stationary Blocking
This disc has a very effective introduction to camera theory, including lens choices, framing choices, camera angles (their effect on perspective and depth), action (180 deg) lines and coverage. Then it moves on to camera setups for common static character staging scenarios A, I, L, O etc. Personally I’m not a big fan of these letter approaches, as too many people try to memorize the setups and force the staging to fit these templates. However they’re not a bad starting place to explain the basic theory of covering dialogue and as you’ll see, once you move on through the discs, they soon become redundant as you learn a global approach to block and shoot characters in any arrangement.

Anyway — by the end of this first disc you will be able to comfortably stage and shoot the simplest shots: static character dialogue, shot with a static camera (with maybe a little bit of pan or tilt involved).