Shaky camera

Handheld camera,shaky cam,queasy cam,queasicam, hand-held camera or free camera is a cinematographic technique where stable-image techniques are purposely dispensed with. The camera is held in the hand, or given the appearance of being hand-held, and in many cases shots are limited to what one photographer could have accomplished with one camera. Shaky cam is often employed to give a film sequence an ad hoc, electronic news-gathering, or documentary film feel. It suggests unprepared, unrehearsed filming of reality, and can provide a sense of dynamics, immersion, instability or nervousness. The technique can be used to give a pseudo-documentary or cinéma vérité appearance to a film.

Too much shaky camera motion can make some viewers feel distracted, dizzy or sick.

Traditionally, still and motion photography have relied on firm, stable mountings for a jitter-free image. Great effort is spent to obtain a perfectly stable image. However, experiments with hand-held camera began as early as 1925 with Ewald André Dupont's Varieté and Abel Gance's Napoléon.

Hand-held camera movements became more prominent in some feature films of the 1960s, including a number of John Cassavetes-directed films. Jonas Mekas named and defended the "shaky camera" work of avant-garde filmmakers, writing in Film Culture in 1962 that he was "sick and tired of the guardians of Cinema Art" accusing the new cinematographers of poor camera skills. Mekas saw it as an inexpensive improvisational technique, one that allowed for greater artistic and financial freedom. Other examples of 1960s hand-held usage include The Miracle Worker, Seven Days in May, The Battle of Algiers and Dr. Strangelove. The Japanese filmmaker Kinji Fukasaku was known for using shaky hand-held camera shots as a trademark in many of his films, most notably 1970s yakuza films such as Battles Without Honor and Humanity as well as in Battle Royale.

...
Wikipedia