Essential Film Terminology: A Filmmaker’s Glossary
Essential Film Terminology
Producer: Business executive who brings together the artist, contracts, and costs.
Director: Film’s chief artistic coordinator who blocks the camera.
Cinematographer: The artist and technician responsible for the lighting.
Art Director: The artist who designs and selects the sets and locations.
Editor: The person who receives work prints of the film’s takes and cuts them.
Continuity: Ensuring that the details of a scene match and make sense.
Tracking Shot: The camera moving smoothly on tracks or dollies.
Dolly: A camera platform on wheels, sometimes with a small crane.
Crane Shot: A shot floating, apparently liberated from gravity.
Shot: A take, the film from a single continuous uninterrupted run.
Sequence: The spliced shots and scenes making up a single unit.
Cut: The spliced place between two frames where one shot ends.
Location: A place some distance from the studio.
Steadicam: A hand-held camera that allows the operator to take smooth shots.
Close-up: A shot filling the screen with the image of any object.
Medium Shot: A shot made with the camera seemingly near from the waist up.
Long Shot: A shot made some distance from the object (head to toe).
High-Angle Shot: A shot made with the camera looking down.
Low-Angle Shot: A shot made with the camera looking up.
Pan: A camera horizontal pivot across a panorama or wide scene.
Zoom: A lens which can be adjusted from wide angle to close image.
POV: A shot from the point of view of the camera (hands).
Reaction Shot: Usually a quick insert shot or cutaway in medium shot.
Establishing Shot: A long shot giving the location where the scene occurs.
Contrast: Grades of light and dark.
Back Light: Lights illuminating the main image from the rear, sculpting it from the background.
Key Light: Lighting which selectively illuminates from the front various prominent features of the image, such as faces or hands.
High Key Lighting: Lighting style in which all parts of the set and the screen are relatively evenly lit.
Low-Key Lighting: Lighting with strongly contrasting areas of light and shadow.
Ambient Sound: Live background sounds creating the illusion that we are seeing and hearing a real world, such as the sounds of distant birds or cars.
Wild Sound: Sound actually recorded while a shot is made.
Background Music: Music heard during the film (drama).
Out-of-Sync: Sound not properly synchronized with the image.
Sound Effects: The SFX and sounds mixed onto the sound track, created to accompany various images as if they were originated by those images.
Master Shot: In classical editing, a medium or long shot of a complete continuous action, later broken up with insert shots, cutaways, match-cutting, cross-cutting, and so forth. (Remember that in classical filming, only one camera is used, and a conversation between two characters may be filmed three times, one after another – an overall view, a view of the first character’s face, and lastly a view on the second character’s face.)
Dissolve: A noticeable fading of one shot while another superimposed on it grows stronger and finally replaces it, quick or slow.
Cross-Cut: An edit cutting from one action to another simultaneous action somewhere else.
Match Cut: An edit maintaining a sense of smooth, continuing acting from shot to shot, even though the second shot is from a different camera position.
Cutaway: A shot briefly interrupting one action to provide a glimpse of another also taking place.
Montage: The French term for editing, referring to any extraordinary or exceptionally artful sequence of shots, and also to the art of editing such a sequence.
Splicing: The process of sticking pieces of film together by using tape or glue.
Continuity: Ensuring that the details of a scene (hair style, length, clothing details, prop positions) make sense when moving from one shot to another.