What is a pillow shot?
A "pillow shot" is a cutaway to a visual feature, usually a landscape or an empty room, that is kept for an extended period of time for no apparent narrative reason (five or six seconds). It might occur at the beginning or end of a scene. The pillow shot can be used to great effect when there's not much else you can do with the camera angle. The pillow shot is useful in situations where you don't want to show too much of the story world but still want to give the viewer a sense of what's going on. For example, if there's a battle raging outside your character's window and you don't want to show that part of the story, then using a pillow shot is easy way to indicate to the viewer that nothing is happening inside the room where the shot is taken - even though, obviously, something is happening. Pillow shots are often used in movies to indicate some kind of transition. For example, if your movie has scenes from several different times of day, then it's useful to be able to show these transitions without having to shoot each scene under varying lighting conditions. You could do this by simply cutting from one scene to the next, but that wouldn't allow you to show anything specific about either moment. Using a pillow shot allows you to show the change in scenery while keeping everything else the same.