Framing a Camerashot: Practice with stills

 

For our first ever short-assignment we were given the cameras to shoot certain camera shots but try and involve a narrative into it - at first, we was perplexed with what we were being asked to do but then me and two other students rushed off to start shooting our story.

Our first shot is (like always) an establishing shot, we used this shot to set the scene and immediately give the audience key information such as; genre, setting and plot. This shot reveals information that it is of course set in a school, I think this establishing shot did a good job of fulfilling its purpose as we was coming to grips with the new equipment.

Our next shot was a long shot of the hall, where our protagonist was revising, this long shot reveals deeper insight to the context such as type of school, it also homes down onto the plot a lot more and makes it more obvious to the audience by bringing a lot of attention to the main protagonists location.
The protagonist also looks isolated and alone in this shot, which can raise questions to the audience such as 'why?', this sparks tension.

We then tried to replicate visual lines on screen, it tells the audience where to look however I don't feel that in this shot I managed to pull that off.

This shot is a high angled medium shot, it is high angled so the protagonist instantly looks inferior, to convey his character accurately we made him look like all he wants to do is revise, using mis-en-scene in this shot (and the main reason this was a medium shot) we had to see his body language. His head is down and he wants to revise, this implies he is a weak character, coinciding with the high angle shot.

The over the shoulder shot shows what the protagonist can see. It brings attention to what he is doing as well as who is doing it. This shot shows what the protagonist is doing and brings attention the the background.

This is a point of view shot, similar to the over the shoulder shot however this shows a lot more empathy, this physically puts you in the character's shoes where as over the shoulder shot is a lot less personal.

This is a low angle shot which now reveals the antagonist, he is clearly a lot more violent and menacing in comparison to the protagonist, the two characters juxtapose due to the visual hierarchy and power shown by height on shot. The angle makes the man look taller than he is and makes the audience feel a lot smaller than the antagonist, this shows that he is more dominant.

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