The 48 Hour Film Project

Why do you need to shoot multiple angles of a scene?Tuesday, September 22, 2020

When you're making a film, why do you need to shoot multiple angles of the same scene? 

How long do you think you could stare at the one thing before you got totally bored?

Probably not very long.

Most people have a very short attention span.

We're constantly bombarded with emails, ads, and social media updates, so our minds are used to jumping around to deal with all of these interruptions. It's no wonder that people have problems focusing for any length of time.

In ordinary conversation, we tend to get bored easily and our minds wander off. But when we're telling a story like we do in film, we want people to be hyper focused on what we're telling them. In order to keep people focused, we need to keep them paying attention to our film, and we do that by giving them something new to look at.

We pay closer attention to things that are constantly changing. That's why films cut to different shots as they're telling the story. This constant visual stimulation keeps people intrigued because our minds can't help but wonder, what are they going to show me next?

So the reason that we shoot multiple angles of any given scene is to make sure we have enough coverage in the editing room. Coverage is the amount of footage shot and the different camera angles used to shoot a scene.

You might have medium shots that show most of the general action and all of the characters in a scene within the camera frame. These are called master shots. They're good for establishing what's happening in the scene.

But then you may want some tighter closeup shots so people can really see what one character is saying or doing. And then you might want some shots of other characters reacting to what the first character is saying. You might want some wider shots to show what kind of environment the characters are in. And you might want some very tight shots to show some of the details of the setting.

All of these different types of shots help to tell your story in different ways and from different perspectives. And having a variety of different shots will allow you to give the people watching your film something new to look at, so they pay closer attention and get sucked into the world of your film.