Example 1 — The same extract, described and analysed

Described. The scene shows a mother on the phone talking about her daughter. The daughter is upset and doesn't say anything. Eventually she leaves the room and the mother carries on talking. This shows that the mother doesn't really listen to her daughter.

This is plot recounted, with a conclusion attached. Every sentence would be true of the screenplay. No decision by any filmmaker is mentioned; there are no timecodes; nothing here required the writer to have seen the film.

Analysed. The extract establishes a symmetrical framing at 00:00 — a static wide with the two women at opposite ends of the table, equally weighted in the frame — and then dismantles it. The cut to the mother at 00:38 and the matching medium close-up on the daughter at 01:02 preserve that symmetry in shot size, so the sequence appears, briefly, to be a conventional shot–reverse-shot exchange.

The pattern then breaks. The return to the mother at 01:14 is held for sixty-eight seconds, against the daughter's twelve. The film has established a grammar of alternation and abandons it, and the abandonment is the argument: screen time is distributed exactly as the conversation is, with the daughter allotted a fraction of the duration given to the account being made of her. Because the daughter is discussed in the third person on the telephone while sitting in the room, the withheld reverse shot denies us her reaction at precisely the moments she is being characterised.

What changed. Timecodes throughout, shot sizes named, and — crucially — the analysis is of a pattern and its break, not of individual shots. The reading of the long take is derived from the film's own established grammar rather than from a rule about what long takes mean.

Example 2 — Analysing an absence

The extract's most significant decision is what it declines to show. The daughter's departure occurs entirely off-screen: the cut at 02:22 returns to the opening wide, and the chair is already empty. The film has withheld the one action the daughter takes.

Two effects follow. First, the return to the identical framing makes the absence structural rather than incidental — we are shown the same composition as at 00:00 and invited to read the difference, so the empty chair is presented as a change in an arrangement rather than as an event. Second, denying us the moment of leaving denies us its manner: we cannot know whether she left angrily, quietly or in tears, and so cannot read the departure as a statement she made. The film keeps her uncommunicative to the end.

The sound completes it. The door closes off-screen at 02:31, so the departure is audible but not visible — the frame is revealed as partial, containing less than the world does. And the mother does not pause. The continuity of her speech across the sound of the door is the extract's final observation: the daughter's exit does not interrupt the account being given of her, which is the same thing her presence failed to do.

Why this scores. It analyses an omission, which is where student analysis rarely goes, and it integrates sound with image rather than treating sound as an afterthought. The last sentence connects the two halves of the extract into a single argument.

Example 3 — Handling technique without a rulebook

Weak. The static camera makes the scene feel calm and stable. The medium close-ups create intimacy with the characters. The fade out at the end signals the passing of time.

Three mechanical applications of rules, and all three are wrong for this extract. The static camera does not produce calm here — held against the content, its refusal to move reads as detachment, even complicity. The medium close-ups do not create intimacy equally: they create it with one woman and withdraw it from the other. And nothing suggests time passing.

Strong. The camera never moves in the extract, and in a sequence containing a departure this stillness is conspicuous. A film that tracked with the daughter as she left would grant her action a subject; by remaining fixed on an arrangement she has left, the camera aligns itself with the room rather than with the person, and so with the version of events being narrated in it.

The fade at 02:40 is the only non-cut transition in the extract. Following ninety seconds of long takes and an unbroken continuation of the mother's speech, it does not read as an ellipsis so much as a withdrawal — the film ends the scene without resolving it, closing on speech that is still going on.

The principle. Techniques do not carry fixed meanings. Read every choice against what the film itself has established and against the alternative that was available. Naming the alternative — a camera that could have tracked, a cut that could have been used — is what converts observation into analysis.

Educerie · original worked examples written against the published IB Diploma Programme structure for Film, Topic 1, first assessment 2023. The extract analysed is invented for this material and is not from any existing film. Last reviewed 5 September 2026.