All About Camera Angles

Well-chosen camera angles deliver information, create impact, facilitate editing and enhance actor performance. Since we've recently covered those functions (What's Your Angle, March 2002), let's look more closely at the tools available to fulfill them. Those tools include subject size, horizontal position, vertical position, lens focal length and camera level. How you wield these tools in combination will determine the style of your program and its emotional effect on your viewers.

By far, the most powerful tool is subject size: how much of your subject fills how much of your frame (usually gauged in terms of a standing person). In a long shot, the person is in the middle distance, with plenty of room overhead and below the feet. In full shot, the person fills the frame from head to foot. A medium shot covers waist up and a classic closeup frames head, neck and just a touch of shoulder. (Subject size has further divisions. For instance, a close shot may be a medium closeup, a closeup, a big or tight closeup or an extreme closeup.)

Long shots are for context. We all remember John Ford's tiny wagon trains dwarfed by the vastness of Monument Valley or a gnat-size Omar Sharif riding out of a mirage in Lawrence of Arabia. Long shots literally show us the big picture, revealing who and what is in it and the spatial relationships among them.

Emotionally, distant shots are often, well, distant: detached, observing calmly from the sidelines. They can create tension, however, when they withhold details of tiny subjects that viewers desperately want to examine. In the classic film version of Henry James' Turn of the Screw (released as "The Innocents"), we can just make out an indistinct human figure on the far side of a lake. Is it a ghost? We can't see enough to tell. Though photographed in cheerful sunshine, the shot's as creepy as a crypt at midnight.

Midrange angles (full shot to medium closeup) tend to be inconspicuous because they model typical human perspectives. When you want the video camera to be invisible framing just a window on the actual world mid-range setups are the ticket.

Close shots tend to be intense. Moving in on a subject enhances its importance. The bigger a subject is in the frame, the closer viewers pay attention. Very close angles often do the acting for the performer. In the golden oldie, A Fistful of Dollars, ultra-tight closeups of Clint Eastwood tell us he's planning big surprises for the bad guys, even though his face is perfectly expressionless.

Too many constricted frames can produce claustrophobia in viewers which is great inside a sub like Das Boot, but not as a general rule. It's usually better to range between three-quarter two-shots (knee-to-head) and normal closeup shots, saving the really tight stuff for special emphasi…