10 Second Dictionary
The following terms will help you understand some basic movie concepts. It isn’t a comprehensive vocabulary, or even required knowledge before making a movie, but might help you flesh out your movies especially if you get stuck.
Animation:
The process of assembling a movie one frame at a time.
Bridging Shot :
In film, a shot that attempts to “bridge” or smooth out a jump cut, giving the impression of continuity even though the jump cut has created a spatial or temporal break of some sort.
Story:
“Story” refers to the actual chronology of events in a narrative.
Establishing Shot:
In film, a camera shot that establishes a scene, often as a long shot. This is a common maneuver at the beginning of Hollywood films, especially if the setting plays a significant role.
Eye-Line Shot :
A sequence of two shots. In the first, you are shown a character looking; in the second you are presented with what he or she sees, as if you were looking out of that character’s eyes.
First-Person Narration:
The telling of a story from the perspective of an “I.”
Jump Cut:
An editing cut that creates a break in time or space in what would otherwise be a continuous sequence.
Key-Frame:
In animation, a Key Frame is required to mark any significant change from the frame(s) before it.
Lap Dissolve:
Technical term for when in film one scene fades into the next.
Lateral Wipe:
A highly stylized edit whereby one scene replaces the former scene by appearing to wipe it away from right to left or left to right.
Long Shot:
A view of a scene that is shot from a considerable distance, so that people appear as indistinct shapes. An extreme long shot is a view from an even greater distance, in which people appear as small dots in the landscape if at all.
Match Cut:
Technical term for when a director cuts from one scene to a totally different one, but has objects in the two scenes “matched,” so that they occupy the same place in the shot’s frame. This can be used to create alignment between objects that may not have any connection on the level of story. This is one way to create visual metaphors in film since the match cut can suggest a relation between two disparate objects.
Narration:
Narration refers to the way that a story is told. The different kinds of narration are either 1) the narrator speaks from within the story and, so, uses “I” to refer to him- or herself; or 2) the narrator speaks from outside the story and never employs the “I”.
Objective Treatment:
An objective treatment of a scene is the most common use of the camera in film and television; we are not seeing the scene through the perspective of any specific character, as we do in POV shots or in a subjective treatment of events.
Over-the-Shoulder Shot:
In film, a shot that gives us a character’s point of view but that includes part of that character’s shoulder or the side of the head in the shot.
POV or Point-of-View Shot:
A sequence that is shot as if the viewer were looking through the eyes of a specific character.
Real Time:
In film, when a sequence is presented exactly as it occurs, without any edits or jumps in time.
Shock Cut:
A cut in a movie that juxtaposes two radically different scenes in order to shock the viewer.
Stop-Motion:
Stop motion (or frame-by-frame) animation is a general term for an animation technique which makes a physically manipulated object appear to move. The object is moved by extremely small amounts between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames are played as a continuous sequence
Third-Person Narration:
Any story told in the grammatical third person, i.e. without using “I” or “we”: “he did that, they did something else.” In other words, the voice of the telling appears to be akin to that of the author him- or herself.
Tracking Shot:
In such a film shot, the camera is literally running on a track and thus smoothly following the action being represented or perhaps thus giving the viewer a survey of a particular setting.
Voice-Over Narration:
In voice-over narration, one hears a voice (sometimes that of the main character) narrating the events that are being presented to you.
Wipe:
A smoothly continuous replacement of one shot by another shot, as if the new shot were “wiping away” the old one. The wipe usually proceeds from left to right or vice-versa, but can also proceed from top to bottom or vice-versa.
