General Terms of Film Analysis

If you want to analyse a film, you'll need a special treasury of words in order to describe the camera work. During this post, I'll give you an overview about the vocabularies of film analysis.

1)Basic vocabulary:
shot	uninterrupted piece of film from one point of view
cut	switch from one shot to the next
segment, sequence, scene	increasingly larger units in a film composed of a number of shots
2)Field sizes:
long shot	shows people or objects in a great distance; the environment becomes important example:
full shot	shot of the whole body/object; introduces a character example:
medium shot	upper body/part of an object; shows relationships and actions example:
close-up shot	head and shoulder; shows feelings through facial expressions example:
extreme close-up shot	face only; detailed; shows a detail and raises the tension example:
3) Camera movements:
static shot	camer doesn't move
to pan left/right
to tilt up/down
crane shot	camera moves flexibly in all directions on a crane example: => picture “Religion and Culture (the procession scene)”
to zoom in on/away from sth
tracking shot	camera is on a vehicle moving on the ground
4) Camera positions:
point-of-view shot	shot as seen through the character's eyes
establishing shot	shows the location at the start of a scene
overhead shot	a bird's eye view; (picture of "the procession scene")
over-the-shoulder shot	the camera films from behind over the shoulder of a character
5) Camera angles:
high-angle shot	shot from above; makes things more little
eye-level shot	normal angle on eye level
low-angle shot	shot from below; makes things bigger