Friday, March 19, 2010

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol, in a 1967 interview with Gretchen Berg, said, "There’s nothing really to understand in my work. I make experimental films and everyone thinks those are the kind where you see how much dirt you can get on the film, or when you zoom forward, the camera keeps getting the wrong face or it jiggles all the time: but it’s so easy to make movies, you can just shoot and every picture really comes out right."

Warhol's comments apply to lightweight devices that shoot video, such as the Flip and the iPhone. They're really easy to use, and one can turn them on and just shoot. The problem is that these cameras do jiggle all the time when they're hand-held. Do audiences assume that documentary films are the kind where the footage is always bumpy, as parodied in "The Office" and other shows?
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Documentary Starts Here by Nancy Kalow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.