How can we make someone look great (that is, within the contemporary discourse of beauty)? In the previous blog we look at building intensity and speed using a wide angle, 20mm, lens. Here we’ll shift all the way to a 200mm lens and see what happens.
First, no lies. The “before and after shots are never equivalent.” Since I want to communicate, and not just create, I have changed the eyes, the gesture of one finger, the twist of the wrist, slightly raised the left arm and opened the eyes. Note that these minor adjustments (in terms of object manipulation along x,y,z axes) are very small with huge rhetorical impact. But the most important thing to note is the change in speed: The fast (although implied) vanishing lines are gone. The image is flat. The face is compact, and hence reads as honest, trusting, helping. This is why Umberto Eco said that a sign is anything that can lie. If your character is a shapeshifter archetype, for example, you can use the camera to create the shape shift, just as artists like Neil Gaiman doe this with words (e.g., Jack in The Graveyard Book).However, we have to block out the shot. Using a camera for home-recording and moviemaking are exactly the opposite. When you make a home movie (as a boy I used to film my Pony, Cricket) you have an event and you do what you can to get the shot (journalists often have to work this way). When your communicating, you do the opposite: You decide what lens to use and then place the character and camera accordingly. So, as the character was right on top of the camera for the 20mm shot, she will be very far away for the 200mm shot so the lens can catch at all, let alone properly.
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