10 Movie Cliches That Need To Stop

8. Surveillance Footage Has Amazing Cinematography Watch any film that has surveillance footage and usually it will not only be crazily crystal clear, but the camera will also move with an incredulously slick traction, as though on a dolly or a crane because, you guessed it, it usually is. Though filmmakers might be able to pawn this off as saying the camera has a remote control, these movements are sufficiently complex that no remote control camera on Earth could replicate it; take Martin Scorsese's brilliantly authentic crime thriller The Departed, that's ruined by one solitary moment (which I couldn't find a clip of, so you'll have to take my word for it). When the police are surveilling Frank Costello's warehouse transaction with the Asians, we cut to a screen that shows a car pulling up, and we can only assume that this is from the perspective of a mounted surveillance camera or pinhole camera. However, as the car pulls past our perspective, the camera pulls up with a slick, swooping motion, with the sort of grace that surveillance cameras the world over can only dream of. As a bonus, the same is usually true of news footage in films, too; a clip of a major incident has clearly been filmed with the same cameras and crew as the main feature, making for the best - and most absurdly unrealistic - quality of news footage the world has ever seen.