He'd begun drawing them at around age ten and stopped at fourteen — actually, stopped only temporarily, to be resumed when he arrived at film school at New York University — having completed his pièce de résistance, "The Eternal City," a seventy-five-millimetre saga set in ancient Rome, broken down into closeups, wide shots, medium shots, moving shots.
This lethargy extends to the unimaginative, television-ready framing and messy medium shots that never bring Lamb's journey into focus.
He would stand on tiptoe, bend double, lie on the ground, on his back or his stomach, take pan shots, medium shots, closeups, tracking shots, and panoramic shots, from above and from below, full face, from the side, from behind.
She strides out, with that fast, purposeful walk of hers, onto the veranda, pumps some lead into her prone paramour, then pauses, lowering her gun hand slowly, to contemplate what she's done, striking a pose (in medium long shot) that looks both melancholy and defiant.
I'll put it down in front of me -- wide shots, close shots, medium shots, reverses, all that stuff.
Walsh, who teaches music at Cardiff University in Wales, tends to tell his story the way so many classic filmmakers made their movies -- mostly in medium long shots that take in a wide area without focusing too closely on any one figure.
Rather than present the fall in a continuous CGI camera move, it looked like a real film shoot, as if there were cameras on the surrounding buildings creating a variety of shots -- wide shots, medium shots, and telephoto lens shots.
And it was he who persuaded the great cinematographer Karl Freund to devise for the first time what Freund originally told him would be impossible: the simultaneous shooting of wide shots, medium shots and close-ups as the show was played out in full view of a live audience.
As I walked out of the screening of Kaboom, I ran into a friend who was complaining about the film before we even made it to the elevator: "Close-up, medium shot, close-up, medium shot.
