The Effects of Altering Shots and What Is Contained in Shots
Preface:
When filming a documentary, it is vital to plan ahead certain aspects of footage that will later appear in your documentary. With that, you will want to plan on what your audience should be feeling when viewing your footage. Not only that, but you will need to know how to cause your audience to feel various ways with how you structure and fill in your shots. Here are some ways to vary your shots so that the audience will feel or respond in certain ways to what they see:
Revealing through Simple Camera Movements (source): A common thing that documentary makers will need to know how to do is reveal new information to their audience. To do that, simply cutting to a new stimulus would not be very well made. Instead, various camera movements can be used to reveal new areas, people, or objects. Mainly, camera pans (left or right), crane movements (up and down), or general lifting/dolly in any direction can be used to simply move the focus of a shot towards a new subject.
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| https://www.diyphotography.net/4-essential-camera-moves-every-aspiring-filmmaker-needs-to-know/ In this shot, the subject is revealed through the crane up movements. |
Revealing through Zooms (Cinematography: Theory and Practice by Blain Brown): Furthermore, a zoom in or out can be used to emphasize certain subjects within the shot that were not previously as important. For instance, if I wanted to talk about Obama's Vice President Joe Biden, I could have my shot start with a picture of the former president and zoom out to reveal that Biden was standing adjacent to him. In a different situation, I could have a photo of Obama's cabinet members all standing within a room, and then zoom in specifically on former Vice President Joe Biden to provide emphasis on him.
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| https://camerasgear.com/how-to-use-a-gimbal/ In this example, the zoom out is revealing the woman outside of the subject's cell. |
Highlighting the Unknown through Lighting (Cinematography: Theory and Practice by Blain Brown): Lighting is a key factor in how one formats their shots. One way it can be used is to light only behind a person or object, so that it creates a silhouette of it that makes the subject look mysterious and unknown to the audience.
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| https://www.pinterest.com/pin/115615915406185925/ If I had wanted to talk about a new breed of ants, I could use its silhouette to add a sense of unknown. |
The Passing of Time through Timelapse (source): An easy way to signify the passing of time within the narrative of your documentary is to include a timelapse. Common angles for this in the documentary genre are worm's eye and bird's eye views.
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| https://tenor.com/search/city-timelapse-gifs Time is passing in the day through the timelapse |
POV for New Perspective (source): When talking about the experiences of other people within a documentary, a very common way for filmmakers to convey one's life to their audience is to see the world through the subject's eyes. With my documentary with CV 9 for instance, I can provide POV shots for what it looks like from a student's eyes when in their seat in a classroom or while walking to their next class in the hallway.
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