What Is a Medium Shot? Types, Uses and 10 Film Examples

In 1995, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro shared a scene on screen for the first time. Michael Mann sat them across a table in a Los Angeles diner, and for years fans argued they were never in the room together. The scene never shows both of their faces in the same shot.

They were there. Mann ran two cameras at once, one over each actor’s shoulder, and built the whole scene from medium close-ups. No wide shot of the two of them. Just two men, framed from the chest up, deciding whether they’ll kill each other.

That’s the medium shot’s job. It’s close enough to read a face and wide enough to see what the hands are doing. This guide covers what a medium shot is, the whole medium family from the medium wide shot to the medium close-up, how to shoot one and 10 medium shot examples from film.

What Is a Medium Shot?

A medium shot is a camera shot that frames a person from roughly the waist to just above the head. It sits between a wide shot, which shows the whole body and the setting, and a close-up, which fills the frame with a face. On a shot list, it’s written as MS.

You’ll also hear it called a mid shot or a waist shot. The exact cut point isn’t fixed. Merriam-Webster defines it mainly by distance, as a shot taken from “a distance intermediate between” a long shot and a close shot. Film schools such as NFI put the bottom of the frame at the waist. Adobe stretches it down to “sometimes the knees.” Even the Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film says there’s “no fixed, measurable boundary” between a medium shot and a close-up.

So think of the waist as the middle of a range, not a hard line.

Where it came from: early films showed actors head to toe, like a stage play. Film historian Charles O’Brien traces the change to 1909, when Vitagraph began placing the camera about nine feet from the actors and framing them “from the knees up.” Biograph and Pathé followed, and by about 1910 the closer framing was common. The phrase “medium shot” itself is first recorded in the early 1930s, according to Dictionary.com.

The Medium Shot Family

The medium shot has relatives on both sides. Here’s the family from widest to tightest, with the abbreviations you’ll see on a shot list:

• Medium wide shot (MWS). Also called the medium long shot (MLS), medium full shot (MFS) or three-quarter shot. It frames a person from the knees up. Most sources treat these names as the same frame.
• Cowboy shot, or American shot. Mid-thigh or just above the knee. French critics called it the plan américain because the framing was so common in American films. It’s often said the framing suited westerns because it showed a gunfighter’s holster.
• Medium shot (MS). The waist up.
• Medium close-up (MCU). Roughly mid-chest up, the classic head and shoulders.

One more wrinkle: the labels shift between countries and books. In film historian Barry Salt’s research scale, a waist-up frame counts as a medium close-up, not a medium shot. If two sources seem to disagree, check where each one draws the line.

What Is a Medium Close-Up?

A medium close-up (MCU) frames a person from about mid-chest to just above the head. It’s tighter than a medium shot but still shows the shoulders, so the face gets most of the frame without losing the body around it.

It’s the standard framing for interviews, and news anchors are usually framed in a medium close-up or a medium shot. It’s also the frame you’ll see in countless YouTube videos, with someone talking to a camera on a desk. In movies, the MCU is the go-to for intense dialogue. It brings you close enough to catch a flicker in the eyes, but not so close that every line feels like a big emotional moment.

Many dialogue scenes cut between MCUs in a pattern called shot reverse shot, often framed over the other actor’s shoulder. Our guide to the over the shoulder shot covers that setup in detail.

10 Medium Shot Examples

These 10 medium shot examples count down from a 2018 teen movie to a 1953 Japanese classic. Some are straight medium shots, some are medium close-ups and some are two-shots and three-shots. Each one shows a different reason to choose this size.

10) Eighth Grade (2018)

A shy 13-year-old records confident advice videos for a YouTube channel almost nobody watches.

Kayla, played by Elsie Fisher, is in her last week of middle school. In her videos she gives tips on being confident and putting yourself out there, then signs off with “Gucci!” Off camera, she can barely talk to anyone. The medium close-up of a laptop webcam puts you in the seat of the viewer she’s hoping for.

The film’s opening vlog wasn’t shot on the movie’s Red cinema camera. It was shot on a real MacBook Pro, so it looks exactly like a 13-year-old’s video. Her goodbye vlog goes the other way, a still, tight take on the Red, sharp enough to catch every flicker on her face. Burnham researched the film by watching vlogs from kids with tiny audiences, and he auditioned hundreds of kids before casting Fisher.

9) His Girl Friday (1940)

A newspaper editor has one day to stop his star reporter, who’s also his ex-wife, from quitting to marry another man.

Cary Grant plays Walter Burns, the scheming editor, and Rosalind Russell plays Hildy Johnson, the reporter he can’t afford to lose. Their scenes are a verbal fistfight. They interrupt, overlap and finish each other’s sentences, often while both are on the phone to someone else.

The dialogue has been clocked at about 240 words per minute, much faster than normal speech. The script ran 191 pages for a 92-minute film, and lines were written with throwaway starts and ends so the actors could talk over them. Multitrack sound didn’t exist yet, so the sound mixer switched overhead microphones on and off live, up to 35 times in one scene. The medium two-shot is what makes it readable. You see the line and the reaction at the same time.

8) Paris, Texas (1984)

A man who vanished for four years finds his wife working in a peep show, where she can’t see him through the glass.

Travis, played by Harry Dean Stanton, sits in a dark booth and talks to Jane, played by Nastassja Kinski, through a telephone. She’s on the bright side of a one-way mirror. He turns his chair away and tells their story as if it happened to “these two people.” Slowly, she understands who’s talking.

The set used a real one-way mirror. Jane is brightly lit and Travis sits in near darkness, so each one is cut off in a separate medium close-up. Kinski said she could only see the mirror, not Stanton. When Jane finally switches off her light to see him, his reflection lands on her face, and the two share a frame at last. Her closing speech plays out in one long, unbroken take.

7) The King’s Speech (2010)

The future King George VI works with an unorthodox speech therapist to overcome a stammer before he has to lead a country into war.

Colin Firth plays Bertie, and Geoffrey Rush plays Lionel Logue, the Australian therapist who insists they work as equals. In their first session, Bertie sits low in one corner of the frame while a peeling, painted wall takes up most of the image. He looks squeezed into the edge of his own shot.

Hooper said he framed Firth “with empty space” and Rush with “busy-ness.” The wall was a real find at 33 Portland Place in London, and Hooper said it looked “like a Klimt.” The team used wide lenses, as wide as 14mm, and for the first session the camera sat about 18 inches from Firth’s face. As the friendship grows, the framing settles into something more normal, all the way to the final broadcast at the microphone. Cohen was nominated for the Oscar for Best Cinematography.

6) Past Lives (2023)

Two childhood sweethearts from Seoul meet again in New York, 24 years later, and her husband comes along to meet him.

The film opens on three people at a bar, seen by strangers who try to guess “who are they to one another?” Nora, played by Greta Lee, sits between Hae Sung, played by Teo Yoo, and her husband Arthur, played by John Magaro. Then she turns and looks straight at us. Song called it “a theater trick,” a way to make the audience ask the same question.

Near the end, the film comes back to that bar. Nora and Hae Sung talk in Korean while Arthur, who doesn’t speak it, sits on the outside of the frame. Film Companion noted that his body language marks him as the outsider. The idea came from Song’s own life, sitting in a bar between her husband and a childhood sweetheart. The bar scene took two nights to shoot, and Song kept Yoo and Magaro apart until their characters met on camera.

5) Heat (1995)

A Los Angeles detective and the master thief he’s hunting sit down for coffee, and each warns the other he won’t hesitate.

Al Pacino plays Lt. Vincent Hanna, and Robert De Niro plays Neil McCauley. Hanna pulls McCauley over on the freeway and invites him for coffee. Across the table at Kate Mantilini, a Beverly Hills diner, they talk about their lives, their dreams and the fact that one may have to kill the other. Both actors were in The Godfather Part II, but in separate timelines, so this was their first scene together.

Spinotti put one camera over each actor’s shoulder, rolling at the same time, “barely missing each other.” A third camera shot profiles that never made the cut. The actors chose not to rehearse, and almost all of the scene comes from take 11. Because the scene never cuts to a wide shot of both men, a rumor spread that they weren’t on set together. Mann has shot it down. The two-camera setup is the reason every reaction looks live. It was.

4) My Dinner with Andre (1981)

Two old friends meet for dinner in New York and talk for almost the entire film.

Wallace Shawn plays Wally, a struggling playwright, and Andre Gregory plays Andre, a theater director who walked away from his career to travel the world. They wrote the film together. Over one dinner, Andre tells stories from Poland, the Sahara and Scotland, and Wally pushes back for the comforts of ordinary life.

Malle shot it with one 16mm camera, in takes of about ten minutes, the length of a magazine of film. The restaurant was the ballroom of the empty Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, Virginia, and the heat was off, so the actors kept warm with electric blankets. After the first five days, Malle reshot the footage. One camera angle made Andre seem pompous, and a higher camera made him moving. Small choices like camera height matter a lot when a medium shot is all you have.

3) 12 Angry Men (1957)

Twelve jurors in one hot room decide whether a teenager lives or dies, and one of them has doubts.

The prosecution says the murder weapon is a one-of-a-kind switchblade. Juror 8, played by Henry Fonda, reaches into his pocket and pulls out an identical one he bought near the defendant’s home. The room erupts. It’s the first real crack in the case, and Lumet plays it in medium shots that keep several jurors’ reactions in the frame.

Lumet planned the camera for the whole film, as he explains in his book Making Movies. He started with lenses in the normal range, 28mm to 40mm, then moved to 50mm, 75mm and 100mm, so the room seems to shrink. The camera began above eye level, moved to eye level and ended below it. The early medium shots feel calm and watchful. By the end, longer lenses isolate each face. For more on camera height, see our guide to camera angles.

2) Before Sunrise (1995)

A young American and a French student meet on a train and spend one night walking around Vienna.

At a Vienna café, Céline, played by Julie Delpy, mimes a phone and says “ring.” Jesse, played by Ethan Hawke, answers. Each pretends to call a friend and confesses what they feel about the person sitting across the table. The scene cuts between medium two-shots and over-the-shoulder shots, so you see the speaker and the listener pretending not to listen.

Earlier, in a record shop, the two squeeze into a listening booth and play Kath Bloom’s “Come Here.” It’s one long take in a medium two-shot. They steal glances but never look at the same moment. Linklater kept the song from the actors until that take, and Hawke has called it “probably my single favourite take” of his career. The film looks loose, but it was rehearsed for three weeks and shot in order. Linklater says, “Nothing was ever improvised.”

1) Tokyo Story (1953)

An elderly couple travel to Tokyo to visit their grown children, who are too busy to spend time with them.

Shukichi and Tomi, played by Chishu Ryu and Chieko Higashiyama, visit their son and daughter in Tokyo. The only one who makes real time for them is Noriko, played by Setsuko Hara, the widow of their son who died in the war. After Tomi dies, Noriko stays behind to help. Shukichi gives her Tomi’s watch and tells her she should remarry.

Ozu’s camera sits low, about three feet off the floor, close to the eye level of someone seated on a tatami mat. He used a 50mm lens, and Roger Ebert counted only one camera move in the whole film. Characters are framed in medium shots, nearly face-on, looking just past the lens. There are no dramatic close-ups to tell you how to feel. In 2012, the directors polled by Sight and Sound named it the greatest film ever made.

Medium shots like Ozu’s used to be everywhere. Here’s how much that has changed.

Psychologist James Cutting found that Hollywood shots in the 1940s and 1950s showed about 2.5 people on average. Today it’s about 1.3. Film scholar David Bordwell counted the café scene in The Shop Around the Corner (1940) at 14 shots. The same scene in its remake, You’ve Got Mail (1998), runs 84. Bordwell’s verdict: “The sustained two shot is practically an endangered species.”

How to Shoot a Medium Shot

A medium shot looks simple, but small choices change how it feels. Here’s what to watch:

1. Pick a natural lens. A 35mm to 50mm lens on a full-frame camera gives a medium shot that feels close to what the eye sees. For a medium close-up, many shooters go a bit longer, up to 85mm. On a Super 35 camera, a 35mm lens gives roughly the look of a 50mm on full frame. Go much wider and faces start to stretch, unless you want that, like The King’s Speech.
2. Don’t cut at a joint. A frame line right at the elbows or knees can make a person look cut off. The Video Production Handbook warns it gives the illusion that they’ve been “amputated.” Frame a little above or below.
3. Watch your headroom. Keep the eyes about a third of the way down the frame. The tighter the shot, the less space you need above the head.
4. Give them room to look. Leave more space on the side a character is facing. Break the rule on purpose to make someone feel trapped.
5. Set up the two-shot first. A medium two-shot shows the audience where everyone is. Then cut to singles or over-the-shoulder shots, and keep the camera on one side of the line. Our guide to the 180 degree rule explains why.

When to Use a Medium Shot (and When Not To)

Reach for a medium shot when:

• Two or more people are talking. It keeps faces readable and shows how characters relate in space.
• Body language matters. Hands, posture and props all stay in the frame.
• Timing matters. Comedy often plays best when the line and the reaction land in the same shot, like His Girl Friday.
• You need a steady base. It’s a safe home for a scene, so the cuts to close-ups hit harder.

Skip it when:

• The moment is all emotion. A tear or a realization deserves a close-up.
• The audience needs to know where they are. Use a wide or establishing shot first.
• The detail is the point. A key on a table needs an insert shot, not a medium.

For how the medium shot fits with every other size, angle and move, see our full guide to the types of shots in film.

FAQs About the Medium Shot

The Final Cut on the Medium Shot

A medium shot frames a person from about the waist up, close enough for faces and wide enough for hands. Its family runs from the medium wide shot at the knees to the medium close-up at the chest. Used well, it can carry a whole film, from My Dinner with Andre to Tokyo Story.

Next time you watch a dialogue scene, count the medium shots. How many times does the director cut in close, and why there?

For more on framing, see our guides to shot composition, the over the shoulder shot and the types of shots in film.