The Mysterious Craft of Camera Movement — part two

Functional categories

Roughly speaking, a camera movement may fulfill the following functional categories:

• coverage: reframing, following, passive and active movement.
• compositional: change of shot scale, compositional stops (intra shot stasis)
• visuo-kinetic: exploring depth, circling, elevating, hovering, etc…
• other: some of the more interesting ways to move a camera

Many of these functions are self-explanatory, especially in the coverage category. The camera will reframe to keep characters inside the frame, or it may explicitly follow one or a group of characters on the move. In these circumstances the movement is perceived to be passive: it is initiated by character movement and maintains a stable perception of the said character(s). An active camera movement, on the other hand, moves to generate a different perception. It can also be initiated by the character movement. But it moves to break previous shot scale by going different direction.

I use the term “compositional" to describe the kind of camera movement that aims to bridge two compositions: the start and the end. These two positions afford a stable perception and allow us to focus on the performance: facial expressions, dialogue. This kind of movement sometimes, but not always, involves a change of scale. The camera may dolly in or out to get a tighter or looser framing, or it may move sideways to…