Cinematography

Finally watched about 1 1/2 weeks worth of eps today.
Uh...who was doing cameras?

I mean, I understand the concept of closeup...trying to get to the fears/other emotions...but whoever it was, only (IMHO) succeeded in cutting off people's faces

Got distracting....

If you ever go to the Museum of Television, you can watch this tape of Lela Swift doing a two part interview about her career.  She does discuss Dark Shadows briefly, along with Ryan's Hope, but a lot of the time is devoted to her beginnings in the early 1950s as a floor director on Playhouse 90--or maybe it was Studio One--one of the classic 50s anthology series (and isn't it a contrast what they were doing for TV back then, and the SLOP we are stuck with today).

Anyhow, she mentions that she started having the cameras do those TIGHT close ups for what she considered psychological effect back in those Fifties days.  And she also mentioned that she'd have the camera on the person who was listening, as opposed to the person who was speaking, in a two or three character scene.  A lot of what she was saying about how she did those dramas seemed to have gotten carried over in her work on DS.

In the control room, the shots all 3 cameras were running were visible to the director and producer, and one of them--I think the director--pushed a button that switched the given shot into the feed.  There are photos of this happening in the KLS books (the best ones, I think, are in the original edition of the KLS Scrapbook Memories).

Sometimes, the director (or whoever it was) would switch just as the cameraman was moving into position, about to move, or had not quite finished moving, because of lack of rehearsal time (especially on Chromakey intensive days).   This is why you get those weird moments when it looks as if something has gone seriously wrong on set because the picture is all blurry or the camera is moving from a mole next to someone's nose over to their eyeball.

G.

The director, sitting in the control room, always had the say on how they wanted a shot to look, and  which shot would be taken at any given moment.  The technical director would actually work the switchboard, 'taking' the shot as the director called it, and passing instructions to the camera operators.

The floor manager's job was to keep the human beings in front of the cameras moving about and performing as the director wanted.  The actors couldn't hear the director but the floor manager could and issued directions by hand signals.

I did this sort of thing in college.......I always went for floor manager.....even then I knew enough to stay away from the machinery.