Camera Angles

 The close-up is one of the most common shot sizes in cinema. It’s used when you want to highlight the facial features of your character without any other distractions in the shot. A typical close-up shows the character’s face from their forehead to their chin.

 An extreme close-up goes further, often showing nothing more than the character’s eyes.

A long shot is in some ways the opposite of a close-up. It shows the character’s entire body in frame, from their head to their toes.

The medium shot or mid shot is somewhere between a close-up and long shot. A typical medium shot shows the subject from their head to their waist.

The most neutral camera angle is the eye level shot. The camera points straight ahead at about the same level as the subject’s face.

Photographing from below is sometimes referred to as “worm’s-eye view”, as if you were a worm looking up at the world around you. As you can imagine, this makes all subjects look very large, even if they are very small in reality.

An over-the-shoulder shot is another angle that can shift a viewer’s perception of the scene. A OTS shot is generally a close-up of another character’s face from “over the shoulder” of another character and is used to convey conflict or confrontation.

When portraying a subject from above, it is known as a “bird’s-eye view”. This could be taken from up in the sky, such as when flying in a plane, or could simply be taken by standing on a ladder, slightly above your subject.

Finally, there’s the POV or point-of-view shot. This is used when you want the viewer to see what the character is seeing or feel what they’re feeling. In this shot it as seen as a person walking too their kitchen

An establishing shot in filmmaking and television production sets up, or establishes, the context for a scene by showing the relationship between its important figures and objects. I this shot it can be represented as the person and the strange object in front of him.