Head room describes how a person is centered in a frame in relation to their head. If the person does not have enough head room, their head is cut off in the shot, which makes them appear larger than they are. If the person has too much head room (or available space above their head) it makes it appear as though they are very short. The perfect amount of head room is a relatively small amount of available space above their head, which asks as a buffer so that the top of their head does not get cut off in the shot. A characters head room should remain constant throughout a film, or the audience will get confused as it will appear as though the character is growing/shrinking throughout the film.
Talking Room
Talking room refers to the amount of space in front of a person as they are speaking in a shot. If the person does not have enough talking room, their mouth will be very close to the edge of the shot. This will make it appear as though the person is right next to the person they are talking to. If the person has too much talking room, it will appear as though they are very far away from the person they are talking to. The right amount of talking room is to have more available space in front of the person than behind them to indicate a reasonable & normal distance between them & the person they are speaking to.
The Rule Of Thirds
The rule of thirds states that if you divide a shot up into 9 equal parts, the points of interest or focus of the shot should occur either 1/3 or 2/3 of the way up, rather than in the centre. This apparently creates a more aesthetically pleasing shot.
The 180 Degree Rule
This rule states that if you are filming shots of two people talking, you can only use shots from one side of the conversation. You must imagine that there is an invisible line between the two people, lets call them A & B. When filming the conversation between A & B you can use any number of shots of these two people that fall either 180 degrees to the left or to the right of them. If you used shots that covered the entire 360 degrees it would become confusing to the audience, as it would appear as though A & B had switched sides half way through.
See the below video for further explanation of the 180 degree rule.
Who, What, When, Where, Why, How?
Movies use different shots to answer each of these questions. For our exercise I have chosen the first episode of the popular TV series "How I Met Your Mother" to see how it uses different shots to answer each of these questions.
These first six screen shots above show the montage that begins the episode. It introduces Ted (WHO). From the images we gather he is single, an architect and in his 20's. The first two shots are Medium Close Ups showing the character from chest up.
An interesting feature in these shots is the fact that there is also a voice over narrating the montage. The narrator introduces the setting or WHERE (New York). Interestingly, there is no shot of the city itself in the episode (possibly because it was the pilot?) and the only other WHERE that is answered is in the different settings the characters are in. For example, the bar, and a restaurant (see below). The first shot is a Medium Long Shot as you can see most of the characters, but not their feet. The second I would say is a Long Shot as you can see both the characters head & feet in the frame, but they are still relatively large in the overall shot.
There WHEN question is also easily answered by the narrator on the screen. But the shots above also help to show when as from the surroundings and clothing, we can see that its set in the present day.
The WHAT in this episode is that Ted is worried that he is getting older and wants to hurry up a find a girl he can get married to. Ted describes his feelings to his friend Barney in this shot which we can see is a Medium Shot.
The WHY in this episode refers to why Ted suddenly feels the need to get married. Ted feels this way because his best friend Marshall (who he lives with) is proposing to his college girlfriend Lilly (also Ted's friend). We can see this is another example of a Medium Shot.
The HOW refers to how Ted is going to attempt to get married. He does this by taking a girl he meets, Robin, out to dinner. This shot is shown above in the WHERE explanation.
As I said earlier, this show did not seem to use many of the common shots to answer the who, what, when, where, why, how questions. However they did use these techniques throughout the episode and I have some examples below.
These two shots are good examples of Medium Close Ups. Both of these shots actually start from further away and slowly get closer to the character. Doing this for both the characters makes the shot intimate, and we start to feel like the characters do, gazing upon eachother for the first time.
I thought this was a good example of a Medium Long Shot. We are still close enough to the characters to see their expressions (which is necessary to display the awkwardness in this shot) but the distance that is able to be shown between the characters emphasises the awkwardness they are experiencing.
This is a sharp contrast to the shot before, where the two same characters were shown in a Close Up, about to kiss. The closeness of this shot reflects how close the characters are to eachother, both physically and emotionally. The characters go from nearly kissing to sitting awkwardly on the couch (above) after Ted tells Robin, who he's been on only one date with, that he loves her. Poor Ted!
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