Frame & Face
colinlin.com ↗

Field guide · camera movement & on-screen emotion · edition 01 · by colinlin.com

Every move means something.

A working gallery of the camera moves and the facial performances we direct. What each one does to a viewer, when it earns its place, and the scenes that made it famous. Drag it, scrub it, take it apart.

46
camera moves, seven families
25
emotions, three intensities
96MIN
longest single take in a feature film · Russian Ark, 2002
<1SEC
how long a viewer needs to tell a real smile from a polite one
How to play
Scrub the movedrag the timeline under the viewfinder, or press space to play
Comparepan against truck, zoom against dolly. See the difference side by side
Explode the facepull a performance into its parts and read what each one does
Scene studywatch one real scene with every move and face named as it plays
01 · The rig

The camera is a character.

Pick a move. The viewfinder shows what the audience sees; the floor plan shows what the camera actually did. The two are not the same thing, and that gap is where the craft lives.

Moves46
Static shot
Pan / tilt
AB
TC 00:00:00
01 / 46
Move01
Kindstatic
Frame0000
drag to scrub · space play/pause · ← → previous / next move · C compare · F flip
Floor plan
Height1.6 m
Lens35 mm
Distance3.0 m
Pan / tilt0° / 0°
Parallaxnone
Take4.0 s

02 · The face

Direct emotion you can see.

“Look sad” is not a direction. Each performance here is written as what the face and body actually do (brows, lids, mouth, head, breath, hands) so it can be asked for, checked, and repeated. Explode one to read its parts.

Emotions25
Realization· surprise · medium

03 · Pairings

A move and a face, together.

A camera move on its own is a sentence with no subject. These are the pairings cinema keeps coming back to. Press one to run both at once.

Pairings12

04 · Scene study

One scene, every part named.

Jurassic Park (1993), the first dinosaur. Press play and follow the breakdown: which camera move is on screen, which face, and why that order. Click a beat to jump to it; click a chip to load that move or that face into the consoles above.

Beats14
Now on screenPress play
Jurassic Park (1993) · Universal Pictures · clip used under licence · timings approximate

    05 · Long takes

    How long can one shot hold?

    The tracking shot's purest form is the take that never cuts. Bars are approximate seconds on a log scale; solid bars are true single takes, hatched ones hide their cuts.

    Takes11
    true single takeapparent single take (hidden cuts)whole film