OK, so you have a great story for a film. You’ve got some actors, some expensive equipment, a director’s chair – the whole kit. It’s time to start filming the first scene. Now, where should you point the camera?

We’ll assume here that you need to film someone doing something. An heuristic I’ve come across often as I attempt to learn something about film making is the five shot rule. It gives you a starting point if your mind has gone ablank.

Let’s imagine we want to film someone feeding the ducks. You could film material for the following sequence of shots:

1) A close up of the hands,  showing the fingers tearing up the bread.

2) A close up of the face, revealing who is doing it.

3) A mid shot from the side, showing the same person and their arms throwing bread.

4) An over-the-shoulder or POV shot of a similar action.

5) A wide shot, putting the person in some kind of context.

Obviously, this sequence can be mixed up a little bit. You could throw in a few shots of the ducks in a feeding frenzy for example. Or reverse the sequence, going in the direction of wide shot to close up instead.

It turns out I have an example of just this scenario. The following clip has its faults I concede, but I hope it illustrates the effectiveness of this technique in some way.

Fed up ducks:

(Picture courtesy of BBC Human Planet: Kazakh hunters train golden eagles to hunt foxes and wolves on the mountain plateau in Western Mongolia.)

The BBC series Human Planet is simply awesome. This is the BBC at its best. I caught the one on mountains only yesterday.

To see people surviving like this in such extreme environments is interesting in itself; in my humble opinion the BBC’s treatment enhanced the experience into the realms of the sublime. Keep up the good work.
The BBC series Human Planet is simply awesome. This is the BBC at its best. I caught the one on mountains only yesterday.