Camera Work: Shots and Scenes

Jim Stinson
January 1996

Cutting between shots is as old as filmmaking, and for good reason. The stories that the first directors wished to record might run near half an hour, but their cameras could hold only a few minutes worth of film.

To solve the problem, they shot scenes in short sections, spliced the separate film strips together, and so invented the cut from one shot to the next.

But the camera "angle" did not come around at the same time. Trying to reproduce the experience of watching a play from a theater seat, the earliest filmmakers placed the camera well back from the action and recorded almost every shot from about the same position. The result resembled figure 1a. Booorring!

Movies evolved quickly, however. Within about ten years, directors had learned to vary the camera position to achieve variety, show details, intensify drama or simply conceal the fact that a cut had happened. In short, they had discovered camera angles.

All this might fascinate film historians, but why should you care? Because, to this day, most beginners make videos that resemble figure 1a. They doggedly record one piece of action after another, from pretty much the same position. If they understood the craft of shots and camera angles, they could instantly improve their programs by maybe 1,000 percent.

If this claim seems a tad inflated, compare figure 1a with 1b, in which the camera angles change significantly. Even in this simple diagram, the improvement should be evident.

To explore the craft of camera angles, we're going to look at why you should vary them, how to vary them effectively, and how to select just the right shot "B" to follow each particular shot "A."

But first, what is an angle, anyway? In the visual media, it's simply the position from which the camera records its subject. The word "angle" came from those early, theater- oriented film directors. At a play the audience can watch only from in front of the action; it can't get around to see it from the sides--from oblique angles. As film directors began moving the camera around the action, any setup other than head-on became known as an angle (and eventually head- on was so-labeled too.)

A camera angle usually takes its name from one of the three dimensions in which the camcorder operates:

• Horizontal position, such as front angle, three-quarter angle or profile angle.
• Height, such as bird's eye angle, neutral angle, low angle.
• Distance (gauged by the amount of a standing human included in the frame), such as long shot, medium shot, closeup.

Sometimes, we give a camera setup two or more labels, as in "Give me a high-angle closeup shot."

In an earlier column ("The Language of Shots," March, 1995) we named the more common camera angles. Now we're going to show how to use them.

Changing the camera angle alters the image of the subject being videotaped, and there are several reasons for doing this: to conceal edits, to provide the perfect viewpoint, to add overall variety and to control rhythm and pace.

The most universal function of angle changing is to conceal edits. Every professional video consists of scores or even hundreds of separate shots. But except in some commercials and music videos, the edits that connect those shots should be invisible to viewers.

Now you might think that the more closely angle B resembles angle A, the more invisibly the two shots will cut together. But the reality is just the opposite, because this type of cut matches the camera angle rather than the subject's action. Cutting between nearly identical angles results in what looks like a single shot with a piece chopped out of its middle. That's called a jump cut and it's very obvious, even to the inattentive viewer.

To achieve an unobtrusive cut, you need to do the exact opposite. Instead of matching the camera angle while changing the action, you match the action while decisively changing the angle. That way, the subject's apparently unbroken movement fools the viewer into believing that the action is uninterrupted, and the very different angle of shot B prevents effective comparison with shot A. The result is an invisible edit, and an uninterrupted scene flow. We'll show how to achieve these stealth cuts a bit further on.

The next most important reason for changing the camera angle is to find the best viewpoint and framing for the shot--that is, to set the camcorder at the right place at the right time, and aimed to show the right amount of the right subject.

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