Infilmmaking andvideo production, ashot is a series offrames that runs for an uninterrupted period of time.[1] Film shots are an essential aspect of amovie whereangles,transitions andcuts are used to further express emotion, ideas and movement. The term "shot" can refer to two different parts of the filmmaking process:
The term "shot" is derived from the early days of film production when cameras were hand-cranked, and operated similarly to the hand-crankedmachine guns of the time. That is, a cameraman would "shoot" film the way someone would "shoot" bullets from a machine gun.[3]
Shots can be categorized in a number of ways.[2]
The field size explains how much of the subject and its surrounding area is visible within the camera'sfield of view, and is determined by two factors: the distance of the subject from the camera ("camera-subject distance") and thefocal length of the lens. Note that the shorter a lens's focal length, the wider itsangle of view (the 'angle' inwide-angle lens, for instance, which is "how much you see"), so the same idea can also be expressed as that the lens's angle of view plus camera-subject distance is the camera's field of view.
Three less often used field sizes are:
"Shots" referring to camera placement and angle rather than field size include:[5]
Cutting between shots taken at different times or from different perspectives is known asfilm editing, and is one of the central arts of filmmaking.[10]
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The length of shots is an important consideration that can greatly affect a film. The purpose of editing any given scene is to create a representation of the way the scene might be perceived by the "story teller." Shots with a longer duration can make a scene seem more relaxed and slower-paced whereas shots with a shorter duration can make a scene seem urgent and faster-paced.
The average shot length (ASL) of a film is one of its cinemetrical measures. For example,The Mist has a length of 117 minutes and consists of 1292 shots, so the ASL is 5.4 seconds, whileRussian Ark is a single 96-minutelong take, so an ASL of 96 minutes or about 5,760 seconds, a factor of 1,000 difference.
Shots with extremely long durations are difficult to do because any error in the shot would force the filmmaker to restart from scratch, and are thus only occasionally used. Films famous for theirlong cuts includeFrancis Ford Coppola'sThe Godfather in which the entire first scene is a long take featuring Bonasera describing the assault on his daughter, andAlfred Hitchcock'sRope, which only cuts at the end of eachreel, and does so surreptitiously so that it seems as if the whole film is one take.Orson Welles'sTouch of Evil opens with a long tracking crane shot, as doesRobert Altman'sThe Player.
In addition toRussian Ark, which was made in 2002 using digital recording technology, other films known for their extremely long takes includeStanley Kubrick's2001: A Space Odyssey and the works ofAndrei Tarkovsky starting withSolaris.Béla Tarr is also known for using very long takes consistently in his films. Joss Whedon's feature filmSerenity introduces the main characters with a long take. AlthoughFish & Cat is a single 134-minute long take, the narrator succeeded in playing with time and including severalflashbacks.
