The Editor's Toolkit

Chapter 2

Shots, Our Building Blocks

Before you tackle any job, you need to gather together the tools and raw materials that will enable you to do that job. Editing is no different. Our raw material (and sometimes it’s very raw!) is in the form of photographed shots, and our tools are the skills with which we put those shots together.

First of all, let’s have a look at the range of the types of shots which might be presented to us and how we might describe and categorise them.

This chapter is divided as follows:

• 2.1 Shot Sizes—This describes the framing, or content, of individual shots, thus we talk of close-ups or wide shots.
• 2.2 How the Shot ...