Six Shots System (Photo and Film Tutorial)

Now I am on to video class. One of the first things we learned about is the six shots system.

What it is.

It's a way to take interesting, professional shots. The frame is split into nine portions (you may have seen this option on your phone camera or Instagram). The points of interest should be placed where the lines intersect, called cross-points. These are pictures, but this rule is also applied to film. I photographed my friend doodling to show the six shots.

Over the Shoulder

The name is pretty self-explanatory. You take a shot of what people are doing over their shoulder. This gives a third-person perspective, like you are a person looking over their shoulder.

Hands Close Up

What are hands for? Their for doing things: picking stuff up, typing, drawing, etc. That's what this shot is about. It's a close up of the hands when they do something interesting.

 Close up of Face

This is my friend, as you can see. Here you can kind of see some emotion, but we just want to focus on her entire face to see what she's looking at and see the smile too. An extreme close up of the face would show just the eye or something. Due to the awkwardness of holding a camera that close to the face though, our teacher says we don't need one.

 Medium

Most of the shots with people are used to show a trait of the character. Wide should be for first showing the character, but this is medium. It's half the body, so at about the hips or waist up. Sometimes entire character shots have too much extra background, so this one is used.

 Wide

Like I said, this would be used for showing the character for the first time, head to toe. That way so we can get a full sense of what they look like.

 Extreme Wide

Finally, we are at the last one. This is a far away shot of all the characters. We see the desks and the computers and everything else. This is too show the setting of the shot.

The End.

Well, now you can go make your own photos and videos. Oh, and one last note. Use all of these, and vary them. However, especially for extreme wide, don't use them too often. "Yes, I know this is filmed in NYC, can I just see what they're up to?" Even if your talented with beautiful shots, your viewers will get bored if there are just too many. Well then, good luck to you! :)