Journalists soon learned that Mr. Cage was also a colorful off-camera character, making much of his immersive preparations.
As cameras rolled, he clambered up a luxury sports car, began air-drumming to the rhythm of an off-camera character (or maybe just to the beat in his own head), then jumped off the car and hung on a basketball rim, Blake Griffin-style.
Ms. Miller stages this portion with tightly controlled cameras; characters walk in and out of the unmoving frame, desperate to stake a claim.
This subject position — in which the camera, a character and the audience share the same look — can be very powerful, allowing you to see through a character's eyes in blissful or terrifying communion.
The camera lent character to the scenes through other visual distortions, like erratic waves in the frame or strange lines that appear amid too much contrast.
So does the recent sketch in which the stars address the camera in character as "sandwich experts" with a tech-sector sensibility.
Now, twenty years or so on, the pictures have the timbre and heft of pure American tribute; how dare we presume that a pianist or an astronaut can be an icon of himself, that he deserves the chance to find on camera the character that most becomes him, but not a guy with seven dollars in his pocket?
Against the background of a northern factory run by a company called Mackintosh Textiles, Abbott used a dramatist's equivalent of the movements of a camera: one character was in big close-up every week with people from previous episodes seen in passing or the far distance.
Separating fact from fiction will ultimately fall to the audience (Benedict Cumberbatch speaking to the camera in character at the end of the film says as much); and that won't be an easy task.
With a handheld video camera the character uses, Franco leaves those General Hospital acting skills behind on his soap opera dish and covers a full range of emotions.
Blizzard's community managers encouraged users to post game movies and screenshots, but viewers complained that Pope's suggestion of sexual actions through creative camera and character positioning was pornographic.
