ABSTRACT
What makes for a good camera operator? Someone who can communicate with the actor through the camera. The guy who shot Contents under Pressure, Mark McKay, has an innate ability to create a relationship through the camera with the subject. And in fact, Mark in a sense disappears. The actor communicates to the viewer through the camera, so at its best it becomes like a dance between the camera operator and the actor. The camera moves around, not just for the sake of movement but because the movement is somehow “right” in terms of the camera’s relationship to the actor at that time. Such an intuitive camera operator is incredibly important and very rare.
