In the sixth of ten installments of the Watchmen Video Journal, today we get a look at the segment titled “Shoot to Thrill”, and focuses on the “look” of Watchmen. It’s mostly an interview with the director of photography and one of the producers.
I was just about to decry this whole process until they told me something really, really interesting. Trust me, this is gonna kill you. Watchmen…is shot entirely with one camera. For those of you who, like me, haven’t been to a film school and just had to learn about this sort of thing after the fact, it’s actually pretty rare to shoot a movie with just one camera, especially a big-budget movie intended for a wide theatrical release. In most movies, you have a second or a third camera available to shoot closeup shots of actors in dialogue, sort of as a way to speed things up, but when you have just one camera, all you can see is what that one camera sees. If it goes in for a closeup it does so necessarily in real time. This is highly unusual and represents a strange new direction for filmmaking.
One that, once again, I’m definitely eager to catch.
