framing, tracking & camera angles

Extreme wide shot, very wide shot, wide shot, mid-shot, medium close up, close-up, extreme close-up and cutaway. These are your eight basic shot types and will form the foundation of your framing choices. Of course you can experiment with them and perhaps fuse one frame type with another, for example, combing a closeup with an extreme close up, cutting off the top and bottom of a subjects head.

The rule of thirds divides the frame into nine sections as shown in the picture below....

Points of interest should be positioned away from the centre of the key, adding a bit of variation, hence making what would normally be a boring scene a little more interesting.

You also need to think about the space in your shots strategically, for example, if a man is looking at a woman walking across the road, you need to place spacing in front of the mans face for him to look into and spacing in front of the woman to walk into. It simply makes the sequence look less awkward and more natural.

I found that a lot of the framing within my AS level piece didn't abide to these rules, and hence degraded the flow of the piece. To improve, I will keep these beneficial techniques to the forefront of my mind when producing mine and Paddy's short film!

examples of camera angles include: eye level, high angle, low angle, birds eye and slanted.
Camera angles influence how a shot is interpreted and effects the implication of a particular shot, for example, a low angle shot of a fully grown man can make him appear more domineering and all powerful, although he is actually 5 foot 7 inches (Tom Cruise).

tracking includes movement of panning, titlts, dolly shots, hand-held shots, crane shots and aerial shots. These are all possible within our production, apart from maybe the crane and aerial shots. Hand-held shots are fairly hard to pull off well as, although they provide a jerk, ragged effect, they need to be treated with professionalism and can easily be seen as amateur if executed wrongly.

I believe that i will use at least one of these tracking techniques within my piece as they can be use to convey movement, establish a scene, create variety within a static sequence of shots and so on. A very handy factor in filming.

This short preview from Merlin, series 4, episode 2 demonstrates some of the tools that I've mentioned-


Camera Panning becomes prevalent throughout the first half of the clip, as emphasis is put on the armoured characters while they talk. Alternitavely, as emphasis is put on Merlin e.g. being carried, the shots become still. Perhaps this signifies how lifeless Merlin is at this time. He seems cold and deathly, and it is as though time has almost run out for him.

The framing abides to the rules i stated earlier, in that when one or two characters are in the shot, they are positioned off centre. This ultimately makes the scene more interesting, without changing the action on screen.

Camera angles are used subtly, but effectively within the scene e.g. while the soldiers talk, their heads occasionally reach the top of the frame as the camera is tilted slightly upwards. Where as shots of Merlin, up until him mounting the horse, reveal a clear and distinctive gap between his head and the top of the frame. It is subtle, but the state of power between the characters are revealed through the camera angles. Even when Merlin is on the horse (higher position), the soldier in the scene appears to be higher up (superiority), suggesting how extreme Merlin's state of weakness is.