Camera Angle and Movement Research!

While working on our storyboard today, me and our director had a couple disagreements on how we would film certain shots. The main focus of our discussion revolved around whether or not we were to use a tracking shot for our opening scene (where we introduce mc 1). 

Our director wanted the camera to track mc 1 as they walked through the store, at first in a similar fashion to how we did our first film (where we tracked the character's feet), but I believed it didn't fit within our story. Then the subject changed to how we were going to track them:  with a hand-held camera or with a dolly cart.

It was in this discussion that I learned a dolly shot was a type of tracking shot in which the camera would be placed atop a cart and moved to track the character.

Later on, a separate issue arose. The way shots 2 and 3 were planned made them both seem like wide shots, but I was sure there was a difference, so I began my research. I learned that wide shots are very similar to long shots, in the sense that they both contain a display of characters and their environments. The main differences between the two are the cameras used for filming them and their compositions.

Frame from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"

Wide angle shots typically display a person or object in relation to their surroundings, but you can see wider in these shots than you can far, which makes them optimal to use to establish indoor settings and outdoor landscapes (they're typically used on flat areas, or high-angle shots of cities).

Long shots show a little less than wide shots. Although they still present a character and their surroundings, you can see farther than you can wide, as narrower cameras are used to film these shots (wide angle lenses are typically used for wide shots). You can see much farther past the character or object the shot is focused on.

I'm glad that I was able to learn the difference between these two shots, as we will be using both of them in our film to introduce our main characters!