In film, a shot is a continuous strip of motion picture film, created of a series of frames, that runs for an uninterrupted period of time. Shots are generally filmed with a single camera and can be of any duration. A shot in production, defined by the beginning and end of a capturing process, is equivalent to a clip in editing, defined as the continuous footage between two edits. Frames, shots, clips, scenes, and sequences form a hierarchy of units fundamental to many tasks in the creation of moving-image works.
The etymology of the term "shot" derives from the early days of film production when camera were hand-cranked. Hand-cranked cameras operated similarly to the hand-cranked machine guns of that era. Therefore, one "shot" film the way one would "shoot" bullets from a machine gun.[1]
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The term shot is often incorrectly applied to the field size of an image which at times is also incorrectly referred to as framing. The field size defines how much of the subject and its surrounding area is visible within the camera's field of view, and is determined by two factors: Camera-to-subject distance and focal length of a lens. Note that the shorter a lens's focal length, the wider its angle of view (the 'angle' in wide-angle lens, for instance, which is "how much you see"), so the same idea can also be expressed as that the lens's angle of view plus camera-subject distance is the camera's field of view.
(Caution: In this context, the focal length value differs with each film gauge and CCD size for optical reasons, but the angle of view is the same for any of them, so it's easier comparing the angle of view with lenses for different formats than their focal lengths. Same angle of view does always give the same field size at the same camera-subject distance no matter what format you're using, same focal length does not. For in-depth informations behind the laws of optics regarding the influence that focal length and different formats have on field sizes, see 35 mm equivalent focal length, crop factor, image sensor format, and Digital photography: Sensor size and angle of view.)
An identical field size can be achieved at varied camera-subject distances by using a lens with a different focal length, and at varied focal lengths by choosing a different camera-subject distance. Field size differs from framing in that within professional environments where prime lenses are dominant, the latter applies only to camera placement (including camera angle), not focal length.
However, maintaining an identical field size at varying camera-subject distances and focal lengths must be handled with caution as it applies different amounts of perspective distortion to the image: Wide-angle lenses expand a perspective, while long focus lenses compress a perspective (the famous dolly zoom, taken with a variable focal length lens, is a vivid, intuitive demonstration of this effect). Thus, it's more common in photography and cinematography to determine an image's field size by only changing two out of the two factors.
The field size (along with the specific amount of perspective distortion) greatly affects the narrative power of a shot. There are a number of standardized field sizes, the names of which are commonly derived from varying camera-subject distances while not changing the lens. The four basic kinds of field sizes (see gallery above) are:
Three rarer used field sizes (see bar on the right) are:
There are other variants, such as the medium close up (between medium and close up), and terms for moving in (such as "lean-in") and moving out (such as "lean-out").
"Shots" referring to camera placement and angle rather than field size include:
Cutting between shots taken at different times is known as film editing, and is one of the central arts of filmmaking.
The length of shots is an important consideration that can greatly affect a film. The purpose of editing any given scene is to create a representation of the way the scene might be perceived by the "story teller." Shots with a longer duration can make a scene seem more relaxed and slower paced whereas shots with a shorter duration can make a scene seem urgent and faster paced.
The average shot length (ASL) of a film is one of its cinemetrical measures. For example, The Mist has a length of 117 minutes and consists of 1292 shots, so the ASL is 5.4 seconds, while Russian Ark is a single 96-minute long take, so an ASL of 96 minutes or about 5,760 seconds, a factor of 1,000 difference.
Shots with extremely long durations are difficult to do because any error in the shot would force the filmmaker to restart from scratch, and are thus only occasionally used. Films famous for their long cuts include Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather in which the entire first scene is a long take featuring Bonasera describing the assault of his daughter, and Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, which only cuts at the end of each reel, and does so surreptitiously so that it seems as if the whole film is one take. Orson Welles's Touch of Evil opens with a long tracking crane shot. A film that was actually a single take is the recent Russian Ark. Another prominent examples known for its extremely long takes are Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the works of Andrei Tarkovsky starting with Solaris. Béla Tarr is also known for using long takes in his films. Joss Whedon's feature film Serenity introduces the main characters with a long take.