Crane Shot - Famous Crane Camera Shots

Famous Crane Camera Shots

• The Western High Noon had a famous crane shot. The shot backs up and raises, in order to see Marshal Will Kane totally alone and isolated on the street.
• 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 for the bottom line. At the end of the second season, an inebriated Johnny LaRue is given his very own crane by Santa Claus, implying he would be able to have a crane shot whenever he wanted it.
• Jean-Luc Godard, in his film Sympathy for the Devil, 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, on camera, the crane he was able to rent with his budget by including it in the scene somewhat. 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 which begins on a single war grave, gradually pulling backward to reveal hundreds of identical crosses.
• The 2004 Johnnie To film Breaking News opens with an elaborate 7 minute long single-take crane shot.
• The 1964 film by Mikhail Kalatozov, I Am Cuba contains two of the most astonishing tracking shots ever attempted.