Whose story is it? Where to put the camera, and why

Of all the decisions a cinematographer makes, the one I find hardest is the simplest to describe: where to put the camera, and why. I spent my final year of the Master of Arts Screen at AFTRS trying to answer it, across three films I was shooting: Dust Cloud, Trudi Refshauge’s short about a badly behaved working dog; Where is my Darling?, Adam Finney’s observational documentary; and Death Doula, a dark comedy pilot directed by and starring Jenna Sutch, which we prepared through 2020 and shot in early 2021, between COVID lockdowns.

I set out looking for the “where”. I came out understanding that the “why” does most of the work.

Point of view is about what the audience knows

Every camera position is a window. Where you put it decides what the audience sees, and through whose eyes. Film theory has a more formal version of this. George Wilson describes point of view as the way a film structures the audience’s “access to narrative”. Put plainly: it is how a film controls what we know, and when we know it.

That sounds abstract until you think about coverage, the set of shots a scene is broken into so it can be edited. Coverage is where point of view becomes practical. A wide shot tells you where everyone is. A close-up on one character, held a beat too long, tells you how they feel before anyone else in the scene knows. Each choice positions the audience physically in the space, and emotionally in relation to the people in it.

The trouble is that working cinematographers rarely talk about coverage this way. The usual aim is “enough” coverage rather than the right coverage, and when you ask how someone chose a shot, the answer is often “intuition”. That is honest, but it isn’t much help when you haven’t yet spent the years it takes for intuition to form. So I tried to take the decision apart.

Five tools for connecting an audience to a character

From reading, interviews with working cinematographers and my own shoots, I grouped the techniques into five.

Optical point of view. Showing what a character sees. Used for a whole film it alienates people, and you lose the actor’s performance. Used sparingly, and paired with a reaction shot, it turns an informational shot into a window into someone’s head. In tests for Death Doula we cut flashbacks against the present-day reaction of Annie, the lead. The flashbacks weren’t strictly from her eyes, but they were close enough that we stayed with her. What matters is less the exact angle than the context of what the character is looking at.

Proximity. Physical closeness between camera and subject. Closer means more presence, softer backgrounds, and the ability to read the smallest change in a face. It is also the hardest to achieve. On Dust Cloud the animals limited how close we could get, and on Where is my Darling? closeness only came late, once our subject trusted us. On Death Doula, Jenna and I agreed early that proximity would be saved for moments of real emotional connection, so it would mean something when it came.

Composition and framing. Wider lenses at the same shot size tend to feel subjective, longer lenses more observational. But a whole film shot at a distance, like Ken Loach’s, can still be deeply moving. Framing does more than focal length: who is bigger in the frame, who is cut off, what is left out. On Dust Cloud I missed chances to use size and framing to give the dog more weight in scenes with the farmers.

Movement. The word “emotion” comes from the Latin for “to move”, and camera movement can carry feeling in two ways: following a character’s movement, or recording the operator’s own response along with the subject. I found the second out by accident on Where is my Darling?, which I come back to below.

Time and focus. Where focus sits guides the audience’s eye, and shifting it can delay or hurry a moment. Changing the frame rate at a turning point, as Christopher Doyle does, can stir a feeling that is hard to name. These are the most intuitive tools of the five, and the ones I had the most still to learn.

What I got wrong on Dust Cloud

The most useful part of the year was a mistake.

Going into Dust Cloud, my main visual reference was Babe. Its cinematographer, Andrew Lesnie, anchors the coverage to the animals: eye-level with them, reaction shots from them, the humans seen from their side. It seemed a perfect fit for a film with a dog as its hero, so I set myself simple rules: keep the camera at the dog’s eye level, always get the dog’s reaction, keep the dog present in the humans’ coverage, and match eyelines between them.

What I hadn’t looked at closely enough was whose story the script was telling. Babe is about animals, told by the animals. Red Dog, by contrast, is about a remarkable dog, told by the people who met him, and its coverage is anchored to the humans. Dust Cloud was a film about a dog, but told through its interactions with the farmers. Its point of view moves between what the dog sees, what the humans say when the dog isn’t there, and an all-seeing view that drives the climax.

I had taken a Babe approach to a Red Dog story. The result was a perspective that felt muddled in places.

The lesson was that a film’s point of view works in layers. At the base is the perspective of the script. On top sit the visual choices: whose eyes, how close, how objective. Music and sound shape it further. If those layers don’t line up, the audience can feel it even when they can’t say why. I’ve since found it applies well beyond film: before choosing any technique, work out whose story it is and who is telling it.

What would have helped was talking about perspective explicitly with the director before the shoot, and storyboarding the key scenes so we could see the point of view rather than assume we shared it. When I later spoke to Geoffrey Hall ACS, who shot Red Dog, he described the practical side: how much of working with animals is planning for what they won’t do.

When the plan meets reality: Where is my Darling?

Where is my Darling? follows Lanz Priestley, who raises money to truck drinking water to drought-stricken outback towns. The schedule was built around several of his deliveries over a ten-day shoot. Repetition would let us learn the rhythm of each delivery, anticipate the action, and have the camera in the right place rather than chasing. The model was the patient stillness of To Be and To Have.

In the end only one delivery happened. The scene we have mixes steady, observed shots with nervous handheld ones, as the camera picked up my own anxiety that there might not be another chance. I’d rather have the composure I was aiming for. But that rawness gives the scene a truth that suits it, and it showed me how much of an operator’s state ends up in the frame.

Agreeing the rules with Death Doula

Death Doula was the most personal of the three films. The story came from Jenna’s own life, and she played the lead. Before the shoot we wrote down a one-line brief for ourselves, to find the most vivid and simple way of telling the story, and a short set of rules to hold us to it. The camera would work in two modes, “control” and “chaos”, matched to Annie’s emotional state. It would never sit on a tripod. Coverage would start with close-ups. And each location would be lit for 180 or 360 degrees, so the actors could move freely and the camera could follow. We borrowed a phrase from the director Lenny Abrahamson for the camera’s attitude: a “delicate watchfulness”.

Then COVID rewrote the plan. Lockdowns pushed the shoot into early 2021, and the rules on set limited how close the camera could get, which hit proximity, the tool we had planned the film around. The delays had one benefit: far more rehearsal time than a student film usually gets. But the script kept evolving right up to the shoot, so we were rehearsing towards a moving target.

Two things made the shoot harder than I expected. With Jenna in front of the camera, I often had to make calls for both of us, as director and cinematographer, without being able to talk them through in the moment. And because the scenes were improvised and built around performance, the camera spent much of its time responding to the action rather than anticipating it. There were moments it was chasing.

In a way, that was the experiment. We had set out to put the actor first and keep the camera from getting in the way, and the film found out how far that can go. What I’d take into the next one is to plan less rigidly for the shots and more firmly for the moments that matter, so the camera knows when to follow and when to hold its ground.

What I took from it

I went looking for a method for placing the camera and ended up with something less tidy: more feeling, more intuition, and a much clearer sense of why. Emotion can’t be broken down into a list of technical choices. But the analysis wasn’t wasted. It gave me words for decisions I used to make blind, and the habit of agreeing those words with the people I work with before the shoot, not during it.

Earle Dresner ACS put it well when I interviewed him: do all the analysis you can, then be willing to throw it away on set. Gordon Willis said something similar, that if something isn’t working, you’re probably doing too much.

I still start every project, film or not, with the same two questions: whose story is this, and what does the audience need to know first?

This is a revised version of “Connected Coverage”, the web exegesis I submitted for the AFTRS Master of Arts Screen in 2020. Read the original, with the interviews, clips and full references.