Camera Shot Types and Movement

Below are the shot types and movement that you will need to recognised and comment on in your exam. You will also need to use a combination of all of these in your own production work.


Shot Types

TASK
Jelly Baby Film

Make a three-shot film with a packet of jelly babies, a pack of Post-It notes and any other items you have in your possession. Assuming you will use the sweets as people, the challenge is to construct a meaningful narrative that tells a story through a combination of framing, point of view and 'anchoring' captions on the Post-Its. Test out the three-shot film with a friend and see how much of the story they can work out from your outcomes. You will find it's much easier to tell a story in this way than you might think and this activity reinforces the fact that three quarters of the meaning of a media text is constructed by the audience - who imagine they can 'join the dots' of the meaning that they infer from the information provided. This also reinforces the fact that storytelling skills are more important than technical abilities - the latter can be picked up very quickly but the former are developed out of life experience and observation.
(Activity taken from 'Media Studies: The Basics' by Julian McDougall (2012, p166)

Key term: Rule of Thirds

Conventional mise-en-scene of film and television relies on the screen being divided into three equal sections, both horizontally and vertically. Using these as guides, the framing appears 'natural' and avoids being overly symmetrical and artificial ('Key Concepts & Skills for Media Studies', 2003, p69)

What you can say about shot types, angles and camera movement

'Textual analysis' is about active 'reading' of images. In film, the frame (i.e. the frame around the TV or the edge of the cinema screen) defines the position from which the image is perceived, and the relationship between on- and off-screen space is very important.

Camera angles:

A low angle is often used to indicate a position of power. The audience is forced to look up at a character and, as such, low angles are used conventionally to represent heroes.

A high-angle shot makes the audience look down at a character (or object) and suggests that the character is in a subservient position.

Examples of codes and their conventional meanings