Film Analysis Terms

Shot

A moment of continuous action in the finished film, undisturbed by cuts, which determine the shot's boundaries (its beginning and ending). Or describes either a single take during the act of filming,

Extreme Long Shot

A shot in which human figures are barely visible; often reserved for landscapes, cityscapes, and other vistas; in many cases, used as establishing shots that disclose settings at great distances.

Long Shot

A shot in which the scale of the object shown is small; a standing human figure appears nearly the height of the screen; the background still dominates the image.

Medium Long Shot

A shot in which the human figure is framed approximately from the knees up. These are especially common because they allow for a nice balance between figure and surroundings.

Medium Shot

A shot in which the object shown is fairly large; a human figure is framed from the chest and shoulders up, and fills much of the screen.

Close-Up

A shot in which the filmed object is relatively large; most often a person's head seen from the neck up, or an object of comparable size that takes up most of the screen.

Extreme Close-Up

A shot in which the object depicted is very large and fills the entire screen; most usually a small object or part of the body.

High Angle

Above, but not directly above

Low Angle

Below

Overhead/Bird's Eye

Directly Above

Canted Angle

Crooked angle

POV

Taken with the camera placed approximately where the character's eyes would be, showing what the character sees; usually placed before or after a shot of the character looking at something offscreen.

POV*

Such shots are said to allow for greater identification on the part of the spectator, since he or she is made to share the visual perspective of the character in question (and by extension, perhaps the same thoughts, desires, emotions, etc.).

3 Parts of POV

Viewing the character, viewing what the character is seeing from their POV, viewing the character.

Lens

A shaped piece of transparent material, usually glass, with one or both sides curved to gather and focus light rays. Collects the light and transmits it to the flat surface of the film strip to form an image of certain size and depth.

Focal Length

Which is the distance in millimeters between the center of the lens to the surface of the film stock, where light rays taken in by the lens converge.

Changing Focal Length

Changes the magnification, depth, scale, and focal range of the image.

Depth of Field

The range of distance before the lens, within which objects may be filmed in sharp focus.

Deep Focus Cinematography

Achieves a great depth of field, with several planes visible and in sharp focus

Shallow Focus Cinematography

Achieves a short depth of field, with only a few planes in sharp focus.

Wide Angle Lens

A lens of less than 35mm in focal length that maximizes depth of field and thus lends itself to shooting in deep focus. This lens tends to exaggerate distances between objects and to distort straight lines near the edge of the frame. The amount of distortion increases the more that foreground objects are the focus: for instance, a close-up shot with a wide-angle lens will distort things almost cartoonishly

Normal Lens

A lens of medium focal length, 35-50mm. As it more closely approximates human vision, this lens minimizes distortions of perspective. Distances between objects in various planes of the image will appear normal (i.e., similar to how things look with our own eyes), if not completely in sharp focus.

Telephoto Lens

A lens with a focal length greater than 75mm that minimizes depth of field and reduces distances between objects in the image. These longer lenses can emphasize certain sections of the image while everything else stays in soft focus, and they allow filmmakers to shoot action at great distances

Zoom Lens

A lens of variable focal length that can transform perspective relations within a single shot. To the untrained eye, a zoom shot may appear to be caused by camera movement. Either the image seems to get bigger as its planes flatten(the effect of shifting to a telephoto lens with a longer focal length) or the image seems to get smaller as its planes broaden and as distances between objects seem to increase (the effect of shifting to a wide-angle lens with a shorter focal length). The camera may stay fixed as the magnification of the image changes drastically.

Rack Focus

Adjusts the focus and perspective within a shot, but the magnification stays the same. Usually forces our attention to shift from one section of the frame to another.

Three Point Lighting

This system combines a key light, the main light source, with fill and backlights to accent and blend the illumination as desired

High Key/Low Key

Intensities of Light (Intuitive)

Mobile Frame

Can result from changes of camera height, distance, and angle during the same continuous shot.

Pan/Panorama

It is a camera movement in which the camera rotates on its vertical axis: onscreen, a pan gives the impression of a frame horizontally scanning space, as though the camera is turning its head left or right.

Tilt

A movement in which the camera rotates on its horizontal axis: onscreen, it gives the impression of unrolling a space either from top to bottom or bottom to top, as though the camera is looking up or down

Tracking Shot

Here, the camera as a whole changes position, traveling in any direction along the ground - forward, backward, circularly, diagonally, or from side to side. This includes aerial and dolly shots.

Dolly Shot

The device that enables the camera to move fluidly on wheels along a track.

Crane Shot

The camera moves above ground level, rising or descending, often thanks to a mechanical arm that lifts and lowers it. These, too, may be combined with tracks, pans, and tilts.

Handheld Camera

Produces an unsteady image; often used by documentary filmmakers because of its sense of immediacy.

Steadicam

A gimbal-balanced camera mount that produces smooth, fluid movements and stabilizes the image no matter how jagged the terrain or uneven the movement of the operator. Developed by Garrett Brown and introduced in the 1970s.It is now a staple feature of television (e.g., pretty much every crime or medical drama).

Mise-en-scène

French term borrowed from theatre that means "put into a scene" - the arrangement of materials before the camera for the purpose of staging a scene. Agency on the part of the filmmaker.

Profilmic

Sometimes used interchangeably with Mise-en-scène incorrectly, as this is a neutral category - it's whatever's in front of the lens at the moment of filming.

Long Take

A single unbroken shot, moving or stationary, that follows a complex action that might otherwise be represented through editing. Lets the action unfold in its natural progression. Instead of interrupting the moment with editing, a long take allows for spatial and temporal continuum. Long takes are often combined with deep focus photography and composition in depth, so that multiple planes of action are in sharp focus.

Sequence Shot

Long take in which an entire sequence unfolds, often through the use of intricate camera movement and skilled choreography of action. The clip from GoodFellas could be described as a sequence shot.

shot/reverse shot (shot/countershot)

This is when two or more shots that alternate between characters are edited together, typically to follow a conversation. Usually, a character in one shot looks to the left, while the other looks to the right ,their eyelines matching

Parallel Editing

Occurs when shots are edited together from at least two different locations, often to depict simultaneous action (and often used to build suspense). Other terms for this technique are crosscutting and parallel action.

Fade-In

A dark screen that gradually brightens as a shot appears

Fade-Out

A shot that gradually darkens as the screen goes black. Occasionally, fade-outs brighten to pure white or to solid colors.

Dissolve

The first image gradually disappears while the second image gradually appears; for a moment, the two images blend in superimposition.

Wipe

A line passes across the screen, either vertically or horizontally, eliminating the first shot and replacing it with another one.

Montage

The French term for editing, but in many cases, the word is evoked to define a more strongly disjunctive manner of arranging shots, according to a conceptual basis.

Medium

An artistic means of expression; "media" is simply the plural of this term, though"media" tends to have a more "mass media" connotation, whereas "medium" tends to be reserved for the arts (e.g., painting is a medium)

Form

The organizing structures that decide the basic shape, look, and texture of a film; this may include narrative structures as well as formal elements that comprise individual scenes and shots (e.g., framing, lighting, camera movement, and so on).

Style

The use of form in accordance with expressive aims

Aesthetics

The very interface between the viewer and the artwork viewed (emotionally, etc).

Sound Bridge

Stresses the connection between both scenes since their mood (suggested by the music) is still the same.

Sonic Flashback

Sound from one diegetic time is heard over images from a later time.

Diegetic Sound

Any voice, musical passage, or sound effect presented as originating from a source within the film's world.

Non-Diegetic Sound

Not originating from the film's world (most background music).

Direct Sound

The music, noise, and speech of the profilmic event at the moment of filming is recorded in the film (opposite of postsynchronization).

Non-Simultaneous Sound

Diegetic sound that comes from a source in time either earlier or later than the images it accompanies.

Offscreen Sound

Simultaneous sound from a source assumed to be in the space of the scene but outside what is visible onscreen.

Postsynchronization Dubbing

The process of adding sound to images after they have been shot and assembled (the opposite of Direct Sound).

Sound Perspective

The sense of a sound's position in space, yielded by volume, timbre, pitch, and, in stereophonic reproduction systems, binaural information.

Synchronous Sound

Sound that is matched temporally with the movements occuring in the images, as when dialogue corresponds to lip movements.

Voice Over

When a voice, often that of a character in the film, is heard while we see an image of a space and time in which that character is not actually speaking.