Ghosts & Entities Moving In A Jerky / Disjointed / Clumsy Manner

[Anonymous]

Spielberg's beach footage in 'Private Ryan has mileage as a horror device being, as I understand it, a combination of an undercranked camera with overprints at the negative stage filling the time gaps. That's before we get onto bleached and flared film stock and a host of other jiggery pokery.

He mainly used hand held cameras, with triggered vibration motors attached, and shot using fast shutter speeds - each framed image becomes sharp and perfectly focused. There's no 'humanistic' blurring from one frame to the next - just a 'juddering' effect (you get see bullet shell casings being expelled from weapons quite clearly - instead of just a fuzzy, more realisic, mush of 'something'). And most of the colour was 'washed out' later to make the footage more 'black and white - ish' and authentic.

 

[colpepper1]

Spielberg's beach footage in 'Private Ryan has mileage as a horror device being, as I understand it, a combination of an undercranked camera with overprints at the negative stage filling the time gaps. That's before we get onto bleached and flared film stock and a host of other jiggery pokery.

He mainly used hand held cameras, with triggered vibration motors attached, and shot using fast shutter speeds - each framed image becomes sharp and perfectly focused. There's no 'humanistic' blurring from one frame to the next - just a 'juddering' effect (you get see bullet shell casings being expelled from weapons quite clearly - instead of just a fuzzy, more realisic, mush of 'something'). And most of the colour was 'washed out' later to make the footage more 'black and white - ish' and authentic.

Yep the colour was de-saturated later, a bit like Powell and Pressburger's 'A Matter of Life and Death' though not in 4 part Technicolor sadly. The chap who told me the techie stuff was a circuit British DP but I don't think our conclusions are exclusive, sounds like might both be right.

As someone above said, the principal of under-cranking is that the movie appears speeded up, used as a creative tool through the silent period, as were variable projection speeds. If the 'Ryan theory is correct it would mean shooting at 8, 12 or 16fps, say, and optically reprinting frames to match 24 speed projection. I can totally see where your fast shutter speeds and vibration sensors come in.

I'm trying to remember the film that was shot exclusively through a first person viewpoint but my memory fails me. There are lots of highly restricted pov films, especially in post war Hollywood, that remind me a bit of SPR, usually paranoid women's films like Rebecca and Secret Beyond the Door.
Imo it's only in recent years the camera has surpassed the lucidity of later silent works, and not often then!

 

[JamesWhitehead]

"I'm trying to remember the film that was shot exclusively through a first person viewpoint but my memory fails me"

Lady in the Lake, 1947, directed by the star Robert Montgomery after the Chandler story. 8)

 

[colpepper1]

"I'm trying to remember the film that was shot exclusively through a first person viewpoint but my memory fails me"

Lady in the Lake, 1947, directed by the star Robert Montgomery after the Chandler story. 8)

That's the one. Cheers!

 

[OldTimeRadio]

On the subject of horror cinematography, I always found the vampire girl sequence compelling in Coppola's Dracula.
Basically the actress moved backward towards the coffin and the print was reversed in post production. It lends it a vaguely impossible feel as she climbs out that dreams take on with a high fever (or is that just me?)

Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., used a similar camera trick in his silent swashbucklers.

The finished theatrical prints show him running up to a high stone wall then making an impossible leap to the top, where he continues running.

Fairbanks actually ran backwards to the top of the wall, jumped off backwards, landed on his feet, crouched down, stood up again and then continued running backwards.

Still one damned fine athletic feat!

(Such scenes were filmed with the camera upside-down. Is that still true today?)

PS. What chilled me the most about Coppola's Dracula were those truely creepy "lazy" shadows.

 

[Anonymous]

Re: Saving Private Ryan

...the production's best boy, Bob Anderson used an electric drill attached to the pan arm then chucked in a bent bolt... if you want more shake get a longer bolt or bend it more. You could also control the degree of shake by drill speed. Front to rear shake (as in POV while shooting a large caliber machine gun) can be achieved with the drill mounted perpendicular to the lens... side to side shake is achieved with parallel mounting.

Source

(Did have more links and stuff here but I pressed a strange key combination and lost it all to the Great Text God.)

 

[colpepper1]

Re: Saving Private Ryan

...the production's best boy, Bob Anderson used an electric drill attached to the pan arm then chucked in a bent bolt... if you want more shake get a longer bolt or bend it more. You could also control the degree of shake by drill speed. Front to rear shake (as in POV while shooting a large caliber machine gun) can be achieved with the drill mounted perpendicular to the lens... side to side shake is achieved with parallel mounting.

Source

(Did have more links and stuff here but I pressed a strange key combination and lost it all to the Great Text God.)

It's amazing how many mainstream cinematic techniques are stick and string at heart. The static-motion stuff that's been around for the last decade in things like the The Matrix where the camera revolves around an apparently motionless figure fiting bullets or whatever started out that way.
I remember seeing it in a gallery context fifteen or twenty years ago by a chap who built a hoop shaped camera with multiple pin holes. Basically you put an object in the middle, expose the film simultaneously then run it through a projector. Because there are multiple frames the viewpoint moves around the object through time as it remains still.

Cut the sequence into your action movie and you have the universal hold-it-right-there popcorn choker. A trombone shot for the noughties. Some of the avant garde film makers of the 60s and 70s were doing cool things with pendulum cameras and all kinds of stuff but while ever movies are crash tested on the barely conscious it's unlikely movie makers will put that stuff in.
Haven't seen Pan's Labyrinth yet but that sounds like it's well shot. Might even get me into a cinema for the first time in five years.

 

[Dick Turpin]

(Excerpted from the "Chased by Skeletons" thread)

This reminds me of a story I was told many years ago, by a childhood mate of mine, who insisted that he was chased down the street by a skeleton.

From what I remember, (this would have been in the very early 1980’s) he said he was walking down a residential street ... when he noticed a skeleton leaning out of an abandoned house window watching him as he walked past.

Thinking someone was larking around in fancy dress, he stopped and laughed at the figure, until the figure gave a toothy grin, and started jerkily climbing out of the window and running towards him. ...

 

[FrKadash]

and started jerkily climbing out of the window and running towards him.

There's that word again, veteran members may recall my fortean fetish for this, how many reports have we read in which there appears this word, or some similar description? I had a letter appear in FT many years ago on this idea. It seems that the Keel idea of fortean phenomenon works well with this type of description of jerky or erratic movements, by which I mean if these things are indeed apparitions directed at psychically or electro-magnetically manipulated witnesses and created by (actually lets not get into what is behind them...), then a jerky movement sounds like it would have some logical (fortean logic) reason, like the flicker of an inter-dimensional projection booth!

 

[Mythopoeika]

There's that word again, veteran members may recall my fortean fetish for this, how many reports have we read in which there appears this word, or some similar description? I had a letter appear in FT many years ago on this idea. It seems that the Keel idea of fortean phenomenon works well with this type of description of jerky or erratic movements, by which I mean if these things are indeed apparitions directed at psychically or electro-magnetically manipulated witnesses and created by (actually lets not get into what is behind them...), then a jerky movement sounds like it would have some logical (fortean logic) reason, like the flicker of an inter-dimensional projection booth!

It reminds me of the word 'lolloped', which was used in an IHTM tale of someone encountering a strange entity on a street at night-time. Remember that one?

 

[EnolaGaia]

It reminds me of the word 'lolloped', which was used in an IHTM tale of someone encountering a strange entity on a street at night-time. Remember that one?

Good point ... 'Lollop' has been used in at least 4 IHTM threads:

Black Stick Man
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/black-stick-man.7411/

Classic Archive Merged: Shadowman
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/classic-archive-merged-shadowman.1785/

Saw My First Shadowman
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/saw-my-first-shadowman.52576/

Rabbit Monster
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/rabbit-monster.16610/

... And Oxford defines it as:

lol·lop /ˈläləp/
verb
move in an ungainly way in a series of clumsy paces or bounds.
"the bear lolloped along the path"

https://www.lexico.com/definition/lollop

 

[Spookdaddy]

There's that word again, veteran members may recall my fortean fetish for this, how many reports have we read in which there appears this word, or some similar description?...

Reminds me of the Sprinting Spooks? thread that I cooked up many years back, and that an odd disjointedness - causing some witnesses to describe the motion as 'angry' - is sometimes associated with rapidly moving apparitions. It's mentioned in the Stocksbridge bypass case, I'm pretty sure - and I think it's sometimes a feature in other road hauntings.

 

[FrKadash]

Reminds me of the Sprinting Spooks? thread that I cooked up many years back, and that an odd disjointedness - causing some witnesses to describe the motion as 'angry' - is sometimes associated with rapidly moving apparitions. It's mentioned in the Stocksbridge bypass case, I'm pretty sure - and I think it's sometimes a feature in other road hauntings.

That is funny as that is exactly one of the cases (Stocksbridge bypass case) I often think about when thinking of this, it stuck in my mind from the brilliant Ghosthunters series from Discovery Channel (1996-1997). Do you remember how the couple described the entity that floated in front of their car? I think the lady said it was all disjointed and strange.

 

[FrKadash]

It reminds me of the word 'lolloped', which was used in an IHTM tale of someone encountering a strange entity on a street at night-time. Remember that one?

That was in the Black Stick Man thread if we're thinking of the same one? The one with two guys walking down a street at night? And they end up rushing to hide behind their front door as the Stick Man entity peers through the front door as if looking for them, with the head going up and down?

 

[Spookdaddy]

That is funny as that is exactly one of the cases (Stocksbridge bypass case) I often think about when thinking of this, it stuck in my mind from the brilliant Ghosthunters series from Discovery Channel (1996-1997). Do you remember how the couple described the entity that floated in front of their car? I think the lady said it was all disjointed and strange.

From memory, I think she described the limbs of the figure as distorted or disjointed, and moving in the wrong directions. Something along those lines.

 

[Lb8535]

There is that famous animated scene in Jason and the Argonauts by Ray Harryhausen . Are you confabulating several memories?

 

[Spookdaddy]

That is funny as that is exactly one of the cases (Stocksbridge bypass case) I often think about when thinking of this, it stuck in my mind from the brilliant Ghosthunters series from Discovery Channel (1996-1997). Do you remember how the couple described the entity that floated in front of their car? I think the lady said it was all disjointed and strange.

Found it. Description of 'distorted' arms and legs moving in weird directions at around 12:20:

 

[FrKadash]

Found it. Description of 'distorted' arms and legs moving in weird directions at around 12:20:

And then the following interview with the bus driver, I had forgotten about this one, with the monk moving around very quickly, it does seem to make sense that these apparitions are outside our Earthly, known laws of nature, like witnesses are being allowed a glimpse of a projected image, and then we could trail off into the idea that these projections could have enough energy behind them to allow them to interreract with physical objects. Very interesting stuff. I'd think that the presence of this and similar descriptions in accounts gives us a way of deciding which cases are genuine manifestations, at least a yardstick to help us review cases.

 

[Spookdaddy]

And then the following interview with the bus driver, I had forgotten about this one, with the monk moving around very quickly...

Yes, the bus driver and the runners stories are not so well know - but as compelling as the ones that stick in most people's memories (although I don't think speed is associated with the latter).

I'm only thirty miles away from Stocksbridge, up in the hills, and remember a local HGV driver who worked for the quarries telling us that there was a layby in the area that truckers avoided because something would 'zip around' their cabs in the dark.

We actually have a bit of a Stocksbridge Bypass Ghost thread - here.

 

[FrKadash]

This is exactly why I at first thought the Fresno Nightcrawler video was genuine, it looked like a perfect bit of video proof of this jerky lollop, I'm not so sure now. Here it is if you haven't seen it. The second video here is even better.

 

[CarlosTheDJ]

There's something about stories of apparitions that don't conform to normal human movements or dimensions that really freaks me out.

It's the true 'otherwordly' element I guess. A grey shape of a human walking through a room is one thing, but if there's something unnatural it adds a layer of shiver.

For example, I know this picture has been debunked as a panoramic artifact, but because I can't make sense of the shape of the hair and head it really sets me off.

 

[Mythopoeika]

That was in the Black Stick Man thread if we're thinking of the same one? The one with two guys walking down a street at night? And they end up rushing to hide behind their front door as the Stick Man entity peers through the front door as if looking for them, with the head going up and down?

Yep, that's the one!

 

[FrKadash]

There's something about stories of apparitions that don't conform to normal human movements or dimensions that really freaks me out.

It's the true 'otherwordly' element I guess. A grey shape of a human walking through a room is one thing, but if there's something unnatural it adds a layer of shiver.

For example, I know this picture has been debunked as a panoramic artifact, but because I can't make sense of the shape of the hair and head it really sets me off.

View attachment 33527

I remember this photo now, does look very weird. Not jerky related but I still think the best video footage of a 'ghost' is the one of the horse rider going around a small field and being filmed by a family member, and when they played the video back they noticed a figure in the bushes. It only moves slightly but the footage looked genuine if you know what I mean, as in it looked very strange and was definitely a human shaped figure but with no discernible features, but to me it vaguely looked as though it was dressed in 17th century clothing. I think it was shown on an old late 90s Bravo (UK) programme, like one of those top paranormal videos one-off specials.

Edit*

Just found the video for those who haven't seen it.

 

[ravensocks]

Maybe these figures come across as strange on a subconscious level - so our brains register them as being in the uncanny valley, unnaturally too/less real or moving oddly. They might look relatively normal, but we perceive some small thing as being more important than it really is, to underline the oddness.

Presumably those with an eye for this sort of weirdness are more cautious around the anomaly, and so live to fight another day. Maybe an extreme version of some sort of survival thing?

 

[Schrodinger's Zebra]

Title looks interesting but there's no way in heck I'm reading a thread called that at this time of night. So just posting this here to bookmark it for another day.

When it's light outside, and all that.

 

[escargot]

I think it's derived from how ghosts/spirits are shown on the big screen.

They used to be portrayed as see-through or wispy figures drifting around in period costume.

However, for some years now they've been seen as more substantial beings that crawl or totter jerkily (that word again) towards the observer. Their heads move in a blur and they have impossibly-jointed limbs.

I have read 'true' ghost stories that describe exactly these effects and thought yeah right, been to the cinema have we, Sonny?

We were watching some supernatural drama on Amazon last night, Moving Water or Falling Water or summat, where unconnected people share dreams. In one there was a person sitting tied into chair with the head-blurring going on. We remarked that it was already old hat.

 

[AgProv]

The former OTR, the idea that UFOs accompany aircraft.
One of these days a proper old fashioned metal disc will land on the Whitehouse lawn, the steps will descend and a man in a bacofoil outfit will say 'Take me to you leader' and shock the hell out of us all.

But... she died in 2001. And if she were still here, she'd be quizzing the aliens as to whether they'd been morally depraved by all the licentious and permissive TV broadcasting Earth had been polluting the galaxy with since 1965. She wouldn't have been at home to the thought of any sort of close encounter of the third kind with an alien, Nordic or otherwise!

Whitehouse

 

[catseye]

I've said this before about the 'horse riding ghost' video - the fact that NONE of the ponies react, even the one going right past it, means it was either an object or a person that they were used to seeing there. I've known horses go off on one in a school because someone had put a jump post or a feed sack outside of the school. Objects that they were perfectly used to seeing, but just not there. And they'd stop to look, or swing their heads around at it, or their ears would prick towards it.

Non reaction means either that it wasn't there at all (and was inserted afterwards), it was there, but something the ponies were very accustomed to and misperceived by the watchers (someone walking past or stopping to watch the lesson - but horses will usually react to someone outside the school, even if just with their ears and NONE of the animals look in that direction) OR it was some mysterious 'thing' that only appears on camera film.

 

[escargot]

I've said this before about the 'horse riding ghost' video - the fact that NONE of the ponies react, even the one going right past it, means it was either an object or a person that they were used to seeing there. I've known horses go off on one in a school because someone had put a jump post or a feed sack outside of the school. Objects that they were perfectly used to seeing, but just not there. And they'd stop to look, or swing their heads around at it, or their ears would prick towards it.

Non reaction means either that it wasn't there at all (and was inserted afterwards), it was there, but something the ponies were very accustomed to and misperceived by the watchers (someone walking past or stopping to watch the lesson - but horses will usually react to someone outside the school, even if just with their ears and NONE of the animals look in that direction) OR it was some mysterious 'thing' that only appears on camera film.

Yup, while I am no horse-whisperer I know not to startle them. It's dangerous.

When we pedal up behind them I call out 'Two bikes approaching! Are we OK to pass?' and they reply and grip the reins tighter or say 'Good horsey!' or whatever you do to reassure Neddy before the scary metal ponies roll up.

 

[catseye]

Essentially horses are prey animals and always on the look out for things which might be dangerous to them.

In the case of my horse, it was that extremely dangerous known predator of horses, the black bin bag. Honestly, he would pass lorries pouring cement, double glazing vans, the most horrific tractor and trailer combinations without turning a hair, but on rubbish day he was a bag of nerves.