- Close-up: A shot that keeps only the face full in the frame.
- Arc shot: A shot in which the subject is circled by the camera.
- Medium/ Mid shot: The shot that utilizes the most common framing in movies, showing characters from the waist up.
- Long/ Wide shot: A shot that depicts an entire character or object from head to foot. Not as long as an establishing shot.
- ‘Cowboy’ shot: A shot framed from mid thigh up, so called because of its recurrent use in Westerns.
- Deep-focus: A shot that keeps the foreground, middle ground and background ALL in sharp focus.
- ‘Dolly zoom’: A shot that sees the camera track forward toward a subject while simultaneously zooming out creating a woozy, vertiginous effect.
- Dutch tilt: A shot where the camera is tilted on its side to create a ‘kooky’ angle. Often used to suggest disorientation.
- Handheld: A shot in which the camera operator holds the camera during motion to create a jerky/ immediate feel, as if the audience are actually experiencing what the character is.
- Low-angle shot: A shot looking up at a character or subject, often making them look bigger in the frame. It can make characters look heroic and/or dominant. This shot is also good for making cities look empty.
- High-angle shot: A shot looking down on a character or subject, often isolating them in the frame.
- Locked-down shot: A shot where the camera is fixed in one position while the action continues off-screen. Often accompanied by sound so the audience know what’s happening. It says ‘life is messy’ and cannot be contained by a camera.
- Over-the-shoulder: A shot where the camera is positioned behind one subject’s shoulder, usually during a conversation. It implies a connection between the speakers as opposed to the single shot that suggests distance.
- Panning: A shot where the camera moves continuously right-to-left or left-to-right. Commonly used in car chases.
- POV shot: A shot that depicts the point of view of a character so that we see exactly what they see. Often used in Horror films to see the world through a killer’s/ victim’s eyes.
- Tracking shot: A shot that follows a subject, be it from behind or alongside or in front of the subject. Not as clumsy or random as a panning shot, much more of an elegant shot.
- Zoom (in/out) shot: A shot deploying a lens with a variable focal length that allows the cinematographer to change the distance between camera and object without physically moving the camera.
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