UW Film Creators Club

What exactly is a shot?

The shot is a fundamental basic film-making technique. Shots are essential building blocks in story-telling and extremely valuable in making a professional-looking film. They are the fundamental units of fim-making and, when used correctly, shots help the director deliberately portray a comprehensible message to the viewer.

Here are some videos giving examples of basic types of shots such as the wide shot, the medium shot, the close-up shot, and the extreme close-up shot.

Getting a shot to look just right takes practice, skill, and sometimes, just plain luck. To all aspiring film-makers, I’ll let you in on a tip that helped me grow the most as a director and a cinematographer:

Experiment with a DSLR camera.

When you mess around with a DSLR, you start to get a feel for elements like lighting, shutter speed, aperture, focal length, depth of field, composition, grain, motion blur, etc. Mastering the manual features of a single-reflex camera will improve your skills greatly as a film-maker.

But what does making films and videos have to do with a photographic camera? Shouldn’t we be talking about video-cameras and camcorders instead?

Well, the foundations of video are build on directly on the grounds of photography. Video, after all, is created by showing a sequence of individual static images in quick succession to create the illusion of motion. Without going into too much history, you might be familiar with the “zeotrope” and its ability to allow a viewer to see a “moving horse”.

this thing's a zeotrope.

At around 15 “frames per second” or “fps”, our brain is tricked into seeing motion. So an image like the following will display a moving horse.

"The Horse In Motion" - In theatres now.

Of course, we’ve come a long way from the ol’ zeotrope. Today we film at many frame rates. Some popular frame rates include: 24 fps (for that “film look”, also known as 24p), 30 fps, and 60 fps (or 60i).

However, the principle of isolating individual static images with subtle gradual and progressive changes and showing them in rapid sequence has not changed at all, and Pixar accomplishes with the use of a strobe light and their bad-ass Toy Story zeotrope.

Video expands on its forefather, giving the photographer a new dimension that photography lacked: Duration.

With the dimension of time, the photographer is now able to capture motion, allowing for extended narrative capabilities that static photographs were restricted in.

Despite video’s advantage in being able to capture “long photographs”, film is still built heavily upon the field of photography and, before one becomes the next Tarantino, Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg or Kurosawa, one can benefit significantly from learning how to operate a manual camera.

Practice your shots well with a camera and learn the ropes. After you’ve mastered the controls, you’ll find that moving from a professional photographic camera to a professional video camera will be a very smooth transition.

Best of luck, and happy filming/photographing.

-Remy

“Time lapse” is a film technique whereby a camera is used to capture frames at specified intervals of time and the resultant footage is played at normal speed, thus giving the impression that time is moving very quickly. The following video consists of time lapse shots of San Francisco and the result is breath-taking footage:

Here’s my attempt at a time lapse video when I strapped my camera and tripod down to my passenger car seat with the seatbelt and drove to Mississauga from Waterloo:

That’s right. Camera. You don’t need to use a video camera or camcorder for this technique, since you could take individual photos and string them together to create a time lapse video. Quicktime Player allows for you to do this and here’s a tutorial describing how.

Lastly, here’s another time lapse video (also set to 8-bit music) by myself using this technique to capture the Arts frosh of 2009 creating a aerial human design:

Try it yourself and create some time lapse shots!

-Remy

EDIT: Remember to leave your camera’s “Auto White-Balance” feature off as it will really throw the effect off as individually frames will have different coloration as the camera recorrects the white balances for each shot and look something like this:

Lesson? Turn off “Auto White-Balance” when filming time lapse videos!