A neat, effective video trick I hadn’t seen before

I was browsing through some other ad agency websites, and ran across this rather cool video touted on the Campbell-Ewald site. (Which unfortunately, they won’t let me embed, which stinks.)

In some ways it’s an odd way to market the Navy. OK, so yeah, the Navy has a precision drill team, but is that really an essential part of the Navy brand? The Marines, by all means. But the Navy? I mean, one of the things that has historically distinguished the Navy from the Marines is that sailors, most sailors, don’t do this sort of thing, while Marines are all about it. (Going back into the distant past, a constant meme in Patrick O’Brian’s novels about the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic wars is marines are always perfectly uniformed, moving in precise unison and standing in perfect formations, with a simultaneous stamp and clash of arms, while sailors, when called into assembly, stand about in a shapeless mass, because rigid order is not how they define themselves.)

But what I liked was the trick of mounting a camera on one of the rifle, so that you get a bayonet’s-eye view of the furious movement as the sailors go through some of the trickier maneuvers in the manual of arms.

It’s a variation of another thing that blew me away, when I first saw it in “Mean Streets.” Scorcese mounted a camera so that it was fixed rigidly to Harvey Keitel’s body during a scene in which he was drinking heavily, so that everything but him seems to move around crazily, and you feel his drunkenness.

Anyway, this was kinda like that. Wonderful what you can do with these tiny HD cameras nowadays, isn’t it?

3 thoughts on “A neat, effective video trick I hadn’t seen before”

  2. Brad Warthen Post author

    Nobody else thought that was cool? I did. But I like things like that. I always wanted to make movies. Maybe in another life. I’ve been too busy over the years to head out to Hollywood and pay my dues.

  3. Doug Ross

    I didn’t like the POV shots from the perspective of the bayonet. Too visually distracting.

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