Crane shot  

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In filmmaking and video production, a crane shot is a shot taken by a camera on a moving crane or jib. Filmmaker D. W. Griffith created the first crane for his 1916 epic film Intolerance, with famed special effects pioneer Eiji Tsuburaya later constructing the first iron camera crane which is still adapted worldwide today. Most cranes accommodate both the camera and an operator, but some can be moved by remote control. Crane shots are often found in what are supposed to be emotional or suspenseful scenes. One example of this technique is the shots taken by remote cranes in the car-chase sequence of the 1985 film To Live and Die in L.A.. Some filmmakers place the camera on a boom arm simply to make it easier to move around between ordinary set-ups.

Notable usage

  • D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) featured the first ever crane shot for a film.
  • Atsuo Tomioka's 1935 film The Chorus of a Million featured the first iron camera crane, which was created and employed in the film in 1934 by Eiji Tsuburaya.
  • Leni Riefenstahl had a cameraman shoot a half-circle pan shot from a crane for the 1935 Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will.
  • A crane shot was used in Orson Welles' 1941 film Citizen Kane.
  • The Western High Noon had a famous crane shot. The shot backs up and rises, in order to show Marshal Will Kane totally alone and isolated on the street.
  • Director Dario Argento included an extensive scene in Tenebrae where the camera seemingly crawled over the walls and up a house wall, all in one seamless take. Due to its length, the tracking shot ended up being the production's most difficult and complex part to complete.
  • The 1980 comedy-drama film The Stunt Man featured a crane throughout the production of the fictitious film-within-a-film, directed by eccentric director Peter O'Toole.
  • The television comedy Second City Television (SCTV) uses the concept of the crane shot as comedic material. After using a crane shot in one of the first NBC-produced episodes, the network complained about the exorbitant cost of renting the crane. SCTV writers responded by making the "crane shot" a ubiquitous symbol of production excess while also lampooning network executives who care nothing about artistic vision and everything about the bottom line. At the end of the second season, an inebriated Johnny LaRue (John Candy) is given his very own crane by Santa Claus, implying he would be able to have a crane shot whenever he wanted it.
  • In his film Sympathy for the Devil, Jean-Luc Godard used a crane for almost every shot in the movie, giving each scene a 360-degree tour of the tableau Godard presented to the viewer. In the final scene, he even shows the crane he was able to rent on his limited budget by including it in the scene. This was one of his traits as a filmmaker—showing off his budget—as he did with Brigitte Bardot in Le Mepris (Contempt).
  • Director Dennis Dugan frequently uses top-to-bottom crane shots in his comedy films.
  • Orson Welles used a crane camera during the iconic opening of Touch of Evil. The camera perched on a Chapman crane begins on a close-up of a ticking time bomb and ends three-plus minutes later with a blinding explosion.
  • The closing take of Richard Attenborough's film version of Oh! What a Lovely War begins with a single war grave, gradually pulling back to reveal hundreds of identical crosses.
  • The 2004 Johnnie To film Breaking News opens with an elaborate seven-minute single-take crane shot.
  • The 1964 film by Mikhail Kalatozov, I Am Cuba contains two of the most astonishing tracking shots ever attempted.
  • A camera crane panoramic master interior live shot opens The Late Late Show with James Corden after the pre-recorded exterior aerial-shot.

See also

  • Technocrane, a telescopic camera crane
  • U-crane, a gyro-stabilized car-mounted telescopic camera crane





Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Crane shot" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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