Directing the Camera: How Professional Directors Use a Moving Camera to Energize Their Films

This is why they’re called motion pictures!

On motion picture and television sets today the director spends 90% of his time directing the camera. Professional actors come to set prepared to direct themselves. In spite of this recent change, 90% of all books on directing do not teach specifically how to direct the camera.

Directing the Camera fills that void by teaching the elements of craft that contemporary directors use to give their films the visually dynamic look preferred by audiences today.

Gil Bettman is a director and an Associate Professor in the Dodge College at Chapman University. He studied creative writing with Robert Lowell at Harvard, and, in 1970, was awarded the Harvard Prize for literary excellence.

Bettman has directed three feature films: Crystal Heart, Never Too Young to Die, and Night Vision, as well as multiple episodes of the television series Fall Guy and Knight Rider.

He also directed numerous rock videos for a variety of artists including Chicago and Sammy Hagar. He recently completed The Long Road to Cabo, a feature documentary for Hagar.