Understanding camera angles - meaning the placement and view of the camera - is something that is critically important to directors and directors of photography. A vivid understanding will ensure that your videos are vibrant and engaging.

Chances are, your eyes are somewhere between five and six feet off the ground. We're used to seeing the world from this height - so much so, that we often forget that the camera can go anywhere else. Sometimes a different perspective, one not shot from eye level, is what your production calls for to make things interesting or to better tell your story.

Today we're going to look at some different camera angles examples that can liven up your video and bring your work to the next level.

The Basics

The shots you see the most are the old standards, the wide shots, the medium shot, the closeup and variations of those, these are the bread and butter of movie making and most of the time, these are the shots you'll be using. There are other types of shots, more difficult to execute and that require more creativity to come up with, that are the spices that make the final product interesting and gripping.

Go High, Go Low

The obvious choices for trying out different camera angles are high and low. A high camera angle can be from the vantage point from a ladder, tree, window, crane or boom - trees and windows are in fixed positions, but both cranes and booms can be rented from film and video supply houses and placed anywhere to get your camera into the sky. They also allow you to move the camera from one elevation to another, such as an establishing shot from high up that follows a car down a road and slowly descends to be level with the car door when it opens.

Small cameras are a relatively recent invention. When Orson Welles wanted to get a shot from the floor for his 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane he had to take picks and axes to the floor, chopping a hole in the stage big enough to fit a camera, tripod, and operator. Today, it requires no effort to put a modern camcorder at shoe level, not just to show grand figures like Charles Foster Kane, but to show children or the family dog from their own eye level.

Go Even Lower

When director of photography Peter Sinclair and director David Mallet were looking to make the best concert film they could out of AC/DC's 1992 gig at Castle Donington, UK, shoe level wasn't good enough - they employed 26 different cameras, including one in a helicopter and another beneath a glass floor, providing an angle from directly underneath the soles of the shoes and all.

Go Low and Move

When Stanley Kubrick sought to unnerve the audience in his 1980 film The Shining, not only did he put his camera at Big Wheel level to show six-year-old Danny Torrence (very capably played by Danny Lloyd) playing in the deserted hotel, he made it into a moving shot, pushing Steadicam operator Garrett Brown around in a wheelchair to provide a dog's-eye-view in one of the most technically memorable scenes in modern cinema.

Sometimes what moves and what stays still makes all the difference. In the 1951 musical Royal Wedding, written by Alan Jay Lerner, camera angles get up-ended in a big way when choreographer Stanley Donen has Fred Astaire dance up the walls and across the ceiling of his room while singing You're All the World to Me. To achieve the effect, which came from an idea by Astaire himself, Donen built a room inside a giant drum, like a clothes dryer, and it was rotated by electronic motors (also not unlike a clothes dryer). The camera, mounted on the "floor", rotated with the set, maintaining its single perspective as the set rolled over, making it seem as though Astaire was running up and down walls. The heavy-metal band Metallica reportedly spent nearly half a million dollars recreating a more industrial version this effect for the video for their 1997 duet with chanteuse Marianne Faithfull, The Memory Remains, the difference in this version had the band on steady platform which the room revolved around.