jerky motion in horror films

If someone has seen films like "dog soldiers" or "28 days later" you'll see a very jerky motion in short cuts of the evil beasts. The secret isn't just to exclude frames, is it? I would be very happy if someone could help me with this effect to get some really creepy results.

Have a nice day // Klaschy

 

It might be the effect they used. If they went for stop-motion, it might have been a fairly bad job. I've seen Dog Soldiers, but don't quite remember it being really jerky, but... ah well. I'm no expert, all I can think of is bad stop motion, probably recorded at a different framerate than the rest of the film.

 

you could record at a different frame rate, then drop every Nth frame to get that jerky effect. Add some camera jitter and there you go. (Kind of like the effect in Gladiator during the fight scenes)

This is a good trick for CGI as the heavy camera motion will prevent the audience from finding flaws in the CGI since they can never really focus on the cgi because of the constant motion. If you've seen League of Extraordinary Gents you can see what I mean during the last monster fight scene.

 

in 28 Days later, they messed around with the frame rate or something(near the end) you could see like every tiny rain drop. It made the end very good. I have seen 28 days later and I dont know what you mean by the Jerkyness, elborate on it.

 

It was also done in the fight scene from Gladiator, and used in most fight scenes now-a-days. I looked it up once, I think they shot it at 60 frames per second. That way, the could use slow motion if desired, without that choppy look, or play 1 frame per second, to show everything that the eye typically misses.

 

I heard you could achieve a similar effect by turning on "sports mode" on your video camera.

 

Changing shutter speed as well as shutter's shape can give the action that jittery frantic pace like in 'Gladiator' and 'Saving Private Ryan'. By using a shutter that 3/4 full instead of half moon shaped, the film is exposed less often thus making for jerky appearance.

 

All things in motion create motion blur. What you are seeing is motion without the blur. To achieve this you must increase your shutter speed and or make it narrower.

This way the film/CCD is exposed for a shorter perioed of time reducing the amount of motion that happens during an exposure, thus reducing its blur..

Don't start removing frames because then you'll have to take the audio out that was captured with it and that will give you a tremendous amount of sound work to do or you'll lose sync. Besides removing frames will only make your video appear to speed up. And you don't want that.

If you want to mimic Gladiator, Saving Private Ryan and 28 Days later then it's all about the shutter speed.

But you'll probably have trouble adjusting shutter speed on a consumer camera. Most don't allow you to adjust shutter speed the way you want.

If the shots are important, look into renting a pro grade camera for certain shots.