Bottled History from Smith Journal on Vimeo.

Hi BCA1,

In this post I'll analyse the above video Bottled History from Smith Journal. In particular I'm going to look at some of the camera techniques.

Source: Again, I found this video through Vimeo Staff Picks.

Byline: An retired sailor discusses his hobby: building ships in bottles.

Theme: There is no overt theme, as in the Sea Chair video I looked at last week, which dealt with environmentalism. Instead this video looks at the craft of building a ship in a bottle, but also gives viewers some background about the craftsman.

Structure: The video could have been structured in many ways. One obvious way would have been to show the process of building a ship from start to finish. The videomaker, however, chose to make it biographical, giving us a little insight into the craftsman's life and creative decisions. The videomaker has chosen to film different elements such as photographs, drawings, boats in bottles, the craftsman at work. The photographs give us the impression of a man who has lived a long and full life, humanising the craftsman by showing us his family and this life at sea.

Other observations: 

Camera
The shots in the video generally employ a very shallow depth of field. Most of the shots are closeups of hands working with tools or ships in bottles. There are a few, though not many, shots of tools and workshop materials to spatialise the environment. There is dolly movement across the photographs at the beginning of the film and also in another couple of places but the video is mostly shot on a tripod.


The bulk of the shots are close, showing the hands at work. The shallow depth of field (DOF) throws the background out of focus. The glue bottle on the right hand side of the frame is also out of focus. This allows us to focus on what is important - in this case, just the hands at work.

There are also a few silhouetted shots such as this one and the shot below. The camera person made a creative choice exposing for the window instead of the subject. If he or she had exposed the craftsman correctly, then the window would have been overexposed. (It would have appeared white).

This shot introduces us to the subject of the video. Notice the shallow depth of field (the background is blurred behind him). This focuses our attention on the subject. The pipe gives him some personality, and goes with the 'old sailor' archetype.
The subject is talking over the top of the image, instead of speaking directly to the camera.

The plans for the boats were another visual element, as were the photographs at the beginning of the video. They keep the viewer interested. The director chose to use all of these plans in a block of shots, instead of dispersing them all the way through the film.



Most shots of the boats in the bottles are of one or two boats, showing the boats and the bottles.





This close shot shows only the bottle. This is as close up as the filmmaker gets. He or she possibly could have gone even closer, showing the fine details of the boat.