Camera view, angle, movement, shot continued

Forced perspective - Examples of forced perspective:

* A scene in an action/adventure movie in which dinosaurs are threatening the heroes. By placing a miniature model of a dinosaur close to the camera, the dinosaur may look monstrously tall to the viewer, even though it is just closer to the camera.

Movies (especially B-movies) in the 1950s and 1960s produced on limited budgets sometimes feature forced perspective shots which are completed without the proper knowledge of the physics of light used in cinematography, so foreground models can appear blurred or incorrectly exposed.

Forced perspective can be made more believable when environmental conditions obscure the difference in perspective. For example, the final scene of the famous movie Casablanca takes place at an airport in the middle of a storm, although the entire scene was shot in a studio. This was accomplished by using a painted backdrop of an aircraft, which was "serviced" by dwarfs standing next to the backdrop. A downpour (created in-studio) draws much of the viewer's attention away from the backdrop and extras, making the simulated perspective less noticeable.

Freeze frame shot - A freeze frame shot is used when one shot is printed in a single frame several times, in order to make an interesting illusion of a still photograph.

"Freeze frame" is also a drama medium term used in which, during a live performance, the actors/actresses will freeze at a particular, pre-meditated time, to enhance a particular scene, or to show an important moment in the play/production[like a celebration]. The image can then be further enhanced by spoken word, in which each character tells their personal thoughts regarding the situation, giving the audience further insight into the meaning, plot or hidden story of the play/production/scene. This is known as thought tracking, another Drama Medium.

A very memorable freeze frame is the end of François Truffaut's The 400 Blows, a New Wave film from 1959. Director George Roy Hill frequently made use of the technique when depicting the death of a character, as in The World According to Garp (1982) and in the memorable ending to the classic western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Hong Kong director John Woo also makes extensive use of freeze frames shots, usually to gain a better focus on to a character's facial expression or emotion at a critical scene. An early use of the freeze frame in classic Hollywood cinema was Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life where the first appearance of the adult George Bailey (played by James Stewart) on-screen is shown as a freeze frame. This technique is used quite a lot in the film Pieces of April. The director uses this to capture special moments that are very significant. Tim Davis' infamous 'wink' at the conclusion of Cocoon: The Return is widely regarded as an unsuccessful use of this technique; Roger Ebert, in his review of the film, remarked of its conclusion, "who is this guy and why is he winking after apparently killing the protagonists?!"A recent use of this techniques is in the opening titles of the movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

High-angle shot - In film, a high angle shot is usually when the camera is located above the eyeline.

With this type of angle, the camera looks down on the subject and the point of focus often get "swallowed up" by the setting.

High angle shots also make the figure or object seem vulnerable or powerless.

High angle shots are usually used in film to make the moment more dramatic or if there is someone at a high level that the character below is talking to.

Long shot - In photography, film and video, a long shot (sometimes referred to as a full shot or a wide shot) typically shows the entire object or human figure and is usually intended to place it in some relation to its surroundings. It has been suggested that long-shot ranges usually correspond to approximately what would be the distance between the front row of the audience and the stage in live theatre. It is now common to refer to a long shot as a "wide shot" because it often requires the use of a wide-angle lens. When a long shot is used to set up a location and its participants in film and video, it is called an establishing shot.

A related notion is that of an extreme long shot. This can be taken from as much as a quarter of a mile away, and is generally used as a scene-setting, establishing shot. It normally shows an exterior, eg the outside of a building, or a landscape, and is often used to show scenes of thrilling action eg in a war film or disaster movie. There will be very little detail visible in the shot, as it is meant to give a general impression rather than specific information.

Long take - A long take is an uninterrupted shot in a film which lasts much longer than the conventional editing pace either of the film itself or of films in general, usually lasting several minutes. It can be used for dramatic and narrative effect if done properly, and in moving shots is often accomplished through the use of a dolly or Steadicam. Long takes of a sequence filmed in one shot without any editing are rare in films.

The term "long take" is used because it avoids the ambiguous meanings of "long shot", which can refer to the framing of a shot, and "long cut", which can refer to either a whole version of a film or the general editing pacing of the film. However, these two terms are sometimes used interchangeably with "long take".

When filming Rope (1948), Alfred Hitchcock intended for the film to have the effect of one long continuous take, but the cameras available could hold no more than 1000 feet of 35 mm film. As a result, each take used up to a whole roll of film and lasts up to 10 minutes. Many takes end with a dolly shot to a featureless surface (such as the back of a character's jacket), with the following take beginning at the same point by zooming out. The entire film consists of only 11 shots. (For a complete analysis of Hitchcock's hidden and conventional cuts in Rope, see David Bordwell's text "Poetics of Cinema" 2008.)

The length of a take was originally limited to how much film a camera could hold, but the advent of digital video has considerably lengthened the maximum length of a take. At least two theatrically-released feature films, Russian Ark and PVC-1 are filmed in one single take; others are composed entirely from a series of long takes, while many more may be well-known for one or two specific long takes within otherwise more conventionally edited films.

Sequence shot - A sequence shot involves both a long take and sophisticated camera movement; it is sometimes called by the French term plan-séquence. The use of the sequence shot allows for realistic and dramatically significant background and middle ground activity. Actors range about the set transacting their business while the camera shifts focus from one plane of depth to another and back again. Significant off-frame action is often followed with a moving camera, characteristically through a series of pans within a single continuous shot. An example of this is the first scene in the jury room of 12 Angry Men, where the jurors are getting settled into the room.

Directors known for long takes

* Chantal Akerman
* Robert Altman
* Paul Thomas Anderson
* Michelangelo Antonioni
* Alfonso Cuarón
* Brian De Palma
* Carl Theodor Dreyer in his sound films
* Bruno Dumont
* Michael Haneke
* Hou Hsiao-Hsien
* Alfred Hitchcock
* Miklos Jancso
* Jia Zhangke
* Mikhail Kalatozov
* Kenji Mizoguchi (see description of Mizoguchi's long take mastery in David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film))
* Max Ophüls
* Otto Preminger
* Jean Renoir
* Jacques Rivette
* Martin Scorsese
* Alexander Sokurov
* Andrei Tarkovsky
* Béla Tarr
* Rob Tregenza
* Tsai Ming-Liang
* Apichatpong Weerasethakul
* Orson Welles
* Joe Wright
* Quentin Tarantino
* M. Night Shyamalan

Ideas and Reflections:
I Find all of the shots listed above incredibly interesting and I have had an idea of using freeze frames shot of empty streets for my own film.