1Cinematography — how it is shot

Shot size — extreme long, long, medium long, medium, medium close-up, close-up, extreme close-up. The analytical point is never the label but the relationship it creates: a close-up grants access to a face and denies context; a long shot places a figure in an environment and subordinates them to it.

Angle — low angle typically enlarges, high angle diminishes, but only where the film has established that convention; a low angle on a child may simply be a child's eye-line. Read angle against the film's own grammar, not against a rulebook.

Movement — a pan or tilt shifts attention within a space; a track or dolly moves the viewer through it; a crane changes the viewer's relationship to the whole scene; handheld implies presence and instability. A static camera is also a decision, and in a film that otherwise moves, stillness is emphatic.

Focus and depth of field — shallow focus isolates and directs; deep focus allows simultaneous planes and lets the viewer choose. A rack focus transfers attention within a shot without a cut, and always means something.

Lens and framing — a wide lens exaggerates depth and distorts faces at close range; a long lens compresses space and flattens the distance between figures.

2Mise-en-scène — what is in front of the camera

Setting, props, costume, make-up, lighting, blocking, and performance.

Lighting repays close attention: high key (low contrast, few shadows) against low key (high contrast, deep shadow); the direction of the key light; whether faces are modelled or flat; whether the source is motivated by something visible in the scene.

Blocking — where bodies are placed relative to each other and the camera — is the most under-analysed element in student work. Who is closer to the lens, who has their back turned, who enters and leaves the frame, and what the distances between people do over the course of a scene.

3Editing — how shots are joined

Continuity editing is the dominant system, designed to be invisible: shot–reverse shot, eyeline match, match on action, the 180-degree rule. Its purpose is to make space and time coherent, so that the viewer attends to the story rather than the construction.

Which makes a violation meaningful. A jump cut, a crossed line, or a match that fails is almost always deliberate, and is where analysis should go first.

Pace — average shot length. A sequence cut every eight frames and one held for two minutes are making opposite demands on the viewer, and the change from one to the other is more significant than either alone.

Transitions — a cut, a dissolve, a fade. And ellipsis: what is left out. A film that cuts from a decision to its consequence, omitting the act, has made an argument by omission.

4Sound — the half students forget

Diegetic sound exists in the world of the film; non-diegetic does not. Films cross the boundary deliberately, and the crossing is meaningful.

Off-screen sound is powerful precisely because it makes the frame feel partial, implying a world larger than the image.

Silence is a sound decision. A film that removes its score at a climax is doing something emphatic.

Dialogue — volume, overlap, pauses, and whether we hear it clearly. Sound mixing decides what a scene is about: what is foregrounded is what matters.