Types of Shots in Film: 23 Camera Shots With Famous Examples

In Lawrence of Arabia, Omar Sharif rides slowly out of a desert mirage. To get the shot, cinematographer Freddie Young found a rarely used 482mm lens, then called David Lean to say he’d solved the mirage problem. One shot, one lens, one of the most famous entrances in film. Every shot you choose does a job like that. Here are the types of shots in film, grouped by size, angle and movement, each with a famous example.

How Shot Types Work

There are three families of camera shots.

Family	The question it answers	Examples
Shot size	How much of the subject is in frame?	Wide shot, medium shot, close-up
Camera angle	Where is the camera, relative to the subject?	Low angle, high angle, over the shoulder
Camera movement	Does the camera move during the shot?	Tracking shot, crane shot, dolly zoom

One shot can belong to all three. The Goodfellas Copacabana shot is a medium shot, at eye level, on a Steadicam. A good shot list names all three for every setup.

Shot Sizes

Shot sizes run from the widest view to the tightest. The wider the shot, the more it tells you about the world. The tighter the shot, the more it tells you about the person.

Extreme Wide Shot

An extreme wide shot makes the subject tiny against a huge landscape.

Ali starts as a shimmer on the horizon and takes forever to arrive. Freddie Young shot it on that 482mm lens so the heat haze would stack up between camera and rider. The desert looks endless because the shot lets it be.

Wide Shot (Long Shot)

A wide shot shows the whole figure with plenty of setting around them.

John Ford frames Ethan through a dark doorway as the family goes inside without him. Cinematographer Winton C. Hoch’s first reaction to the idea was “How corny can you get?” It became one of the most copied shots in cinema. A wide shot is also how most scenes start, as an establishing shot.

Full Shot

A full shot frames a person from head to toe, filling the height of the frame.

Kelly swings round the lamppost and splashes through puddles, and you see all of it. He believed “a dancer should always be shot from head to toe.” Crop the feet and you lose the dance.

Cowboy Shot

A cowboy shot frames a character from mid-thigh up, so a holstered gun stays in frame.

Three men stand in a circle, hands hovering over their holsters. The cowboy shot got its name from Westerns, where the gun had to stay in the picture. The French call it the plan américain, the American shot. Leone shot the standoff to Ennio Morricone’s pre-recorded music.

Medium Shot

A medium shot frames a person from the waist up.

Most dialogue in most films is shot this way. It’s close enough to read faces and wide enough to see hands. Yasujiro Ozu built Tokyo Story from calm medium shots of seated people talking, with the camera low and still. Nothing flashy happens. It’s still one of the most moving films ever made.

Medium Close-Up

A medium close-up frames a person from the chest up.

Jonathan Demme had both actors look almost straight into the lens. “We just started using subjective camera for every dialogue scene,” he told NPR. The framing is tight enough to feel trapped with them, and the glass wall between them almost disappears.

Close-Up

A close-up fills the frame with a face.

Carl Theodor Dreyer shot almost the whole film in close-ups, and the actors wore no makeup. His cinematographer, Rudolph Maté, “understood the demands of psychological drama in the close-ups,” Dreyer wrote. Nearly a century later, Falconetti’s face is still the film.

Extreme Close-Up

An extreme close-up shows one detail, like the eyes.

Sergio Leone cuts from vast wide shots straight to eyes filling a widescreen frame. His cinematographer, Tonino Delli Colli, said actors wanted to work with Leone for one reason: “Those close-ups!” In the duel, Harmonica’s eyes carry a secret the film has kept for two hours.

Camera Angles

The angle is where the camera sits compared with the subject. It changes how powerful, weak or close a character feels. For six angles in more depth, see our guide to camera angles.

Eye-Level Shot

An eye-level shot puts the camera at the subject’s eye height.

Sidney Lumet planned the angles of 12 Angry Men in thirds. He shot the first third above eye level, “the second third at eye level, and the last third from below eye level.” As the jurors get angrier, the camera sinks and the ceiling closes in. Eye level is the calm middle.

High Angle Shot

A high angle shot looks down on the subject.

As the detective reaches the landing, Hitchcock jumps to a shot from high above. He told François Truffaut he went up there “so that I could shoot down on top of the mother,” which hid her face. The high angle makes Arbogast small and keeps the film’s secret.

Low Angle Shot

A low angle shot looks up at the subject.

Gregg Toland shot Kane from so low that you see the ceilings, which most studio sets didn’t have. The sets were built so “we could take up any desired section of the flooring and place the lens actually at floor level,” he wrote. Kane towers, even as he loses.

Bird’s-Eye View Shot

A bird’s-eye view shot looks straight down from directly above.

After the violence, Scorsese’s camera floats over the bodies and the blood, looking straight down. The crew had to cut through the ceiling of the set to get it. The overhead view turns a frenzy into a still, cold picture.

Over-the-Shoulder Shot

An over-the-shoulder shot sits behind one character, looking at the other.

Pacino and De Niro share a screen for the first time, across a coffee-shop table. Dante Spinotti shot both actors at once, “with the two cameras barely missing each other.” The over-the-shoulder coverage keeps them locked together, and each cut back and forth keeps them on their own side of the 180-degree line.

Point-of-View Shot

A point-of-view shot shows exactly what a character sees.

A shell lands near Miller, and the sound drops to a muffled roar. Now we see the beach through his eyes, down to a soldier picking up his own arm. Janusz Kamiński shot about 90 percent of the film handheld. “We wanted to create the illusion that there were several combat cameramen landing with the troops at Normandy,” he told American Cinematographer. The POV makes you one more soldier on the sand.

Two Shot

A two shot holds two people in one frame.

Jesse and Céline squeeze into a booth to hear a record. They take turns looking at each other, and never at the same time. Linklater keeps them in one frame, with no cutting to save them. “I never let them listen to it until we were shooting,” he said.

Insert Shot

An insert shot cuts to a close view of an object or detail.

Darren Aronofsky turns inserts into a drumbeat: a pill, a pupil dilating, a note of money. Matthew Libatique shot them on a macro lens. “If we knew we needed 25 of them, we’d shoot 25,” he said. Strung together, the tiny shots become the addiction.

Camera Movement

Movement changes what the frame shows while the shot is running. For the pan and the whip pan, see our guide to panning in film.

Tilt Shot

A tilt shot pivots the camera up or down on a fixed point.

After the crawl, the camera tilts down from the stars to a planet. Then a small ship races overhead, chased by a Star Destroyer that just keeps coming. “If we don’t grab the audience with the beginning shot we’re in trouble,” said effects cameraman Richard Edlund. The tilt sets up the reveal.

Tracking Shot

A tracking shot moves the camera through space, often on a dolly and rails.

Kirk Douglas walks through the First World War trenches while shells burst and soldiers flinch. Kubrick’s camera retreats in front of him the whole way. The march lasts about two minutes. It makes you walk the line with him.

Crane Shot

A crane shot rises, falls or sweeps on a crane arm.

A bomb goes into a car boot, and the camera follows for more than three minutes. It rises over rooftops, drops to the street and finds the newlyweds. It’s one unbroken crane shot, and the clock ticks the whole time.

Aerial Shot

An aerial shot is filmed from a helicopter, plane or drone.

A small car winds up a mountain road, followed from high above. Aerial cameraman Greg MacGillivray shot it with two cameras “running simultaneously with two wide lenses.” The car looks tiny and alone, and it’s heading somewhere it shouldn’t go.

Steadicam Shot

A Steadicam shot uses a body-worn stabiliser, so the camera moves smoothly on foot.

Henry leads Karen in through the kitchen, past the staff and into the club, where a table appears for them. Larry McConkey walked the whole route with a Steadicam. “We only did I think eight takes and then we went to lunch,” he said. The shot is Henry’s charm, in one move.

Dolly Zoom

A dolly zoom moves the camera one way while zooming the lens the other.

Hitchcock wanted the stairwell to seem to fall away. He said the trick was that “the viewpoint must be fixed, you see, while the perspective is changed.” It was shot on a model of the stairwell laid on its side. Jaws used the same move on Brody at the beach.

Long Take

A long take, or oner, holds a single shot for an extended time with no visible cut.

The camera floats around the inside of a moving car as the attack begins. Emmanuel Lubezki’s crew hung the camera on a rig above a roofless car. The shot has a couple of hidden cuts, but it plays as one. You can’t look away, because the film never lets you.

How to Choose the Right Shot

1. Start with the story beat. What should the audience feel right now?
2. Pick the size. Wide for place, medium for talk, close for emotion.
3. Pick the angle. Low for power, high for weakness, eye level for neutral.
4. Decide on movement. Only move the camera if the move means something.

For how to plan your coverage, see our guides to the shot list, film coverage and shot composition, and our free storyboard template. For what goes inside the frame, see mise en scène. For the frame on a tilt, see the Dutch angle. For how shots join together, see the match cut and the jump cut.

FAQs About Types of Shots in Film

The Final Cut on Types of Shots in Film

Every shot is three choices: how big, from where, and whether it moves. The types of shots in film are just names for those choices.

The famous examples on this list stick because each choice has a job. Lawrence’s wide shot sells the desert. Joan’s close-ups sell her faith. The Copacabana Steadicam sells Henry’s life.

Next time you plan a scene, name all three for every shot. Then ask what each one is doing there.