There are many important parts to the production phase, but one of the most important things to know for it are the different types of shots that you can use. To decide on what type of shot to use you first have to think about what kind of scene it is, if it is a dialogue between two people for example you will probably want to use over the shoulder cross cutting. OTS is basically what it sounds like, in the frame you will see the shoulder of the person being talked to, and the face of the person talking, but you film as it you would someone viewing a normal conversation, to do this you follow the 180 rule (draw an imaginary straight line through the scene that you do not cross, and film everything on one side of that line or the other.
A few more basic shots consist of a long shot, an extreme long shot, a mid-shot, a close up, and an extreme close up. Each of these shots has its own unique purpose, and there is no set one that is right or wrong most of the time, it’s all a matter of opinion and what you think would work best, obviously if you have a person writing an essay or doing something important to the story you won’t want to use an extreme long shot or a close up, so you have to use your judgment.
When you don’t have shots that flow from one to the next you can end up with a jump cut. Jump cuts are usually noticeable and can be anything from hand placement being different to people standing across the room. To avoid jump cuts it’s usually a wise idea to shoot reaction shots of people’s faces and stock footage of different objects that you can cut to to cover up a jump cut. The first project we shot where reaction shots and stock footage became important was our commercial. We were rushed to film and didn’t set everything up, if we hadn’t taken stock footage of objects around the room our commercial would have been a mess full of jump cuts.
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