Bryan Norton, professor at the New York Academy of Filmmaking

The use of video cameras is widespread and overwhelming these days. For this, I would like to give you some advice and guidance to make more of your films appear with a better quality.

The speech will be centered on the basic steps of filmmaking process, and would focus on the “Snapshots”.

The snapshot is termed the moment things that happen are filmed from the minute the director pronounces the word “Action”, up to his portrayal of the word “Cut”.

To simplify the matter, we would address a simple example, to compare between the director and the writer.

Imagine if we had a book, this book consists of chapters, and the chapters consist of paragraphs, and the paragraphs consist of sentences, and sentences consist of words, and words are basically nouns, adjectives and verbs. All the previous combine together and perform the book as a whole.

As well as the film is, a mixture of clips, the clips are made up of scenes, and the scenes as well, are made up of several shots.

Just as is the word to the writer, it is considered the smallest part of the book; the shot is considered the smallest part of the film. Its like the nouns, adjectives and verbs.

As the words to the writer, there is medium- long- and short, shots resemble the words to the director. They meet with each other to create scenes.

In directing a film, choices are not too many, especially that we choose our shots in particular for certain reasons to serve our story and present it in an interesting and attractive manner, and address it visually in a way that brings enjoyment to the viewers through the simplicity of the series presentation.
There are six basic types for a shot (Scene) to be taken:

1 - wide shot: Addresses important information in every scene, when is it filmed, place of filming, it shows the place of action and the doers in their overall general surrounding.

2 - The full Snapshot: The name attests its meaning, and gives a complete picture of the photographed person from head to toe or the objects the subject of photography.

3 -The medium shot: Or we could call it the American shot, the fact that Americans were the ones who innovate it, and they used to use it in the fifties to shoot the cowboy films, or films that were named so-called American West films, to show the guns and weapons, noted that it is frequently used by television channels, which take a medium-range model of the subject photography, or the person.

4 - The medium shot and the close high shot: A mixture of the medium-shot, and the close high shot, as it aim to highlight the facial features as the eyes for example, or to reflect the ideas and feelings that appear on the face of the actor, to deliver the idea in a direct and clear way

5 - The close high shot: Aims to make the scene dramatic and theatrical, and more influential. For that reason its widely used by the directors.

6 - The very close shot: Its too close from the actor and the subject model, so that it is focused on, and is used as a kind of a key influence, but if it was used frequently, it would lose its value as if we draw a line under each word in the text, and we highlight it, it becomes indistinguishable from others without any utility mentioned.