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Camera movement can add a lot to your film. To move the camera you can use a dolly (essentially a wheeled platform on tracks) or a Steadicam® (or, if you are shooting on DV or HDV, a SteadyTracker-type stabilization rig).
It is good practice to use Steadicam-type rigs only when you cannot achieve the same shot with a dolly; due to tight shooting schedules, even high-end TV shows are sometimes guilty of using the Steadicam when a dolly would have produced better results.
James Cameron uses the Steadicam judiciously and to great effect. The Steadicam was also used masterfully by Terrence Malick in his masterpiece “The Thin Red Line.”
Remember that tracking in on a subject produces a radically different look to zooming in on it.
When you zoom in, you are optically magnifying the subject; when you track in, the perspective changes (the subject increases in size faster than the background, as it is closer to the camera than the background is).
Zooming in can produce an eerie look, and this effect was masterfully used by Ridley Scott in Hannibal; tracking in on the actor tends to produce a warm, dynamic, “you are there” kind of feel. Steven Spielberg is probably the master of such tracking shots, with many fine examples in every one of his movies.
Of course, tracking in on the subject means that you will have to follow focus. With a wide aperture and a medium focal length, even a 1/3″ CCD camcorder will require this if the final framing is a tight close-up. If the actor’s eyes are not pin-sharp throughout the shot, you may as well not have a tracking shot at all, because I guarantee that all the audience will be thinking about is your failure to pull focus correctly.
If the depth of field is very shallow, such as might be the case with 16mm or 35mm, you may want to put numbered marks on the floor that correspond to numbered focus marks on the follow-focus knob, and have an assistant call the numbers to aid the focus puller during the shot. This works like a charm.
Cranes are used to achieve vertical camera movement and can add a lot of production value to your project if used in the right context. I got excellent results in the past by using the Cobra Crane II. It only needs one person to be operated and works beautifully.
As with all camera movement, crane shots work best when you have foreground objects parallaxing in the frame. Parallax is the visual phenomenon in which objects that are closer to the camera move across the field of view faster than objects that are further away.
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