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Basic Training: Shot Lingo

At our recent Videomaker Summit in New York, I overheard one of the attendees say: "I always knew that was something I should be doing, but I didn't know what it was called!" in reference to a type of shot the attendee wanted to recreate.

Having names and definitions in your head is a great shortcut to creating good cinema. Over the past 100 years, there has been much significant discussion among film and video professionals about the tools of storytelling. Learning the names and definitions of different types of shots to use with these components helps you add them to your video vocabulary and allows you to draw from them in your own work.

There are really only seven basic types of "shots," which refers to the relative closeness of the viewer to the subject. These range from very close to very far away and are broken down into:

• Extreme Close Up (ECU)
• Close Up (CU)
• Medium Close Up (MCU)
• Medium Shot (MS)
• Medium Long Shot (MLS)
• Long Shot (LS)
• Extreme Long Shot (ELS or XLS)

Extreme Close Ups are very popular today, not just in showing people, but also things. An extreme closeup of a person usually shows the eyes, nose and mouth, cropping off the top of the head and chin, but also it frequently can involve even a fraction of that, such as an eye or a finger clicking a mouse. Objects, such as a key going into a lock, a finger pushing a doorbell or a pencil traveling across a paper, can all be used to keep the viewers interested in your story, by showing something from a perspective they don't normally see, and by also drawing great attention to small detail and events. Imagine our scene is of a spy, stealing documents from a locked office, intercut with extreme closeups of a night watchman's badge, feet walking, key ring, a hand on a doorknob. These isolated shots cause us to imagine the rest of the story and keep our minds engaged. Likewise, an extreme closeup of a character's eye can show nervous motion or a forming tear.

Closeups are usually head shots or head and chest shots. They frame a single person (or part of a person - you can certainly have a closeup of a foot) with very little background. Often long lenses are used for closeups to blur out the background even further and isolate a particular character or face. Closeups with wide-angle lenses are sometimes used for effect, as they distort facial features and give people a strange appearance.

Medium Closeups are sometimes lumped in with the popular "two shot." A "two shot" is a frame filled with two people, often seen on TV news: "Heather! Get me a two shot of the reporter and the person she's interviewing." Typically a medium closeup is "head and chest" - sometimes of two people, and, if you're using a wide screen format, you might be able to comfortably fit three people standing next to one another into a medium closeup.