Cinematography: Scale (MLCM)

This is all cut and pasted from the Yale Film Analysis Website. I have taken out bits that aren't relevant.

Section 3 - Scale
If the same object were filmed at different shot scales it would often signify quite differently. Shot scale can foster intimacy with a character, or conversely, it can swallow the character in its environment. Orson Welles exploited divergent shot scales in Citizen Kane (1941) to demonstrate the changing power relationship between Charles Foster Kane and his lawyer. As a boy, his figure is lost in the snow at the back of the shot as the lawyer arranges for his adoption. As a young man he rebels against Bernstein's oversight, rising in the frame as he asserts himself.

EXTREME LONG SHOT
A framing in which the scale of the object shown is very small; a building, landscape, or crowd of people will fill the screen. Usually the first or last shots of a sequence, that can also function as establishing shots. […]

LONG SHOT
A framing in which the scale of the object shown is small; a standing human figure would appear nearly the height of the screen. It makes for a relatively stable shot that can accomodate movement without reframing. It is therefore commonly used in genres where a full body action is to be seen in its entirety, for instance Hollywood Musicals or 1970s Martial Arts films. Another advantage of the long shot is that it allows to show a character and her/his surroundings in a single frame […]

MEDIUM LONG SHOT
Framing such than an object four or five feet high would fill most of the screen vertically. Also called plain américain, given its recurrence in the Western genre, where it was important to keep a cowboy's weapon in the image.

MEDIUM CLOSE-UP
A framing in which the scale of the object shown is fairly large; a human figure seen from the chest up would fill most of the screen.

CLOSE-UP
A framing in which the scale of the object shown is relatively large. In a close-up a person's head, or some other similarly sized object, would fill the frame. Framing scales are not universal, but rather established in relationship with other frames from the same film. […] Framing scales are usually drawn in relationship to the human figure but this can be misleading since a frame need not include people.

EXTREME CLOSE-UP
A framing in which the scale of the object shown is very large; most commonly, a small object or a part of the body usually shot with a zoom lens. Again, faces are the most recurrent images in extreme close-ups, […]

URL: http://classes.yale.edu/film-analysis_Last Modified: August 27, 2002_Certifying Authority: Film Studies Program_Copyright © 2002 Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520

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