There are many factors working together to affect how viewers respond to film images. To introduce students to some basic filmmaking terms, teachers could arrange to have students examine a few film excerpts before beginning their filmmaking projects or film critiques. To assist students in understanding how media is constructed it would be useful for students to have a common understanding of basic terms such as frame, shot, editing, sequence or scene. These terms are defined on the following page. When a series of frames are projected they create the illusion of movement.
Characters move in or out of frame, depending on the action within the scene.
These terms will be particularly useful when students are creating storyboards or writing a screenplay. A shot is an uninterrupted strip of exposed motion picture film. It depicts some action or objects during an uninterrupted segment of time. It is a segment of footage without internal cuts or edits. A full-length fictional or documentary film is made up of hundreds of shots, and sometimes over one thousand.