The three axes a shot type describes
Most confusion about shot naming comes from collapsing three separate things into one word. Size is how much of the subject the frame holds. Angle is where the camera sits relative to the subject's eyeline. Movement is whether the camera travels while the take runs. Every shot has a value on all three at once, so "medium shot, low angle, slow push in" is a single shot described three ways.
Keeping the axes separate matters on set because they cost different things. Changing size means moving the camera or swapping a lens. Changing angle usually means relighting. Changing movement means laying track or clearing a path for an operator. The same split matters in a prompt: models treat size, angle and movement as three independent instructions, and leaving one out hands that decision to the model.
Shot sizes, widest to tightest
- Extreme wide shot. The subject is a speck and the location is the real subject. Used for scale, isolation, and arrivals.
- Wide shot. Full body with headroom and floor, also called a long shot. This is where an audience learns the geography of a space.
- Medium wide shot. Cut around the knee or mid-thigh, sometimes called a cowboy shot because it leaves room for a holster. Good for body language with a still readable face.
- Medium shot. Waist up. The workhorse of dialogue coverage, because expression and gesture both fit in frame.
- Medium close-up. Chest up. A tighter emotional read that still shows shoulders and posture.
- Close-up shot. Head and shoulders, or a single object filling the frame. Performance carries the shot.
- Extreme close-up. Eyes, mouth, hands, a dial, a wound. Spatial context is stripped away on purpose.
- Insert. Any tight shot of a detail cut into a wider scene, usually a prop or a single action beat.
The labels are elastic by design. A "medium shot" on a two-person frame is wider than a medium on one person, and a director and a DP will happily disagree about where a frame line sits. Nobody minds, because this vocabulary exists to communicate intent in a few seconds, not to pass a measurement.
Angles and movement
Angle is the second axis and the list is short: eye level, low angle, high angle, over the shoulder, bird's eye, worm's eye, and the rolled dutch angle. None of them change what is in the frame. They change the power relationship inside it.
Movement is the third axis. Pan and tilt rotate the camera in place. Dolly, truck, arc and crane move the camera through space. Handheld, steadicam and gimbal describe how the camera is carried. A dolly zoom moves the body and the lens in opposite directions at once. Holding still is also a choice, and writing "static" or "locked off" on a shot list is worth the two words.
How shot types combine across a scene
The classic pattern is a funnel. An establishing shot or a wide shot sets the space, a medium shot brings the audience into the conversation, over-the-shoulder shots carry the exchange, and a close-up arrives when the scene turns. Editors call this "cutting in". Running it backwards, from tight to wide, tends to read as release or abandonment.
You do not have to use every rung. Skipping from a wide straight to an extreme close-up creates a jolt, which is useful once in a scene and exhausting if repeated.
Naming shot types in a prompt
Image and video models learned this vocabulary from caption data, so the common labels land and the trade jargon does not:
- Reliable:
wide shot,medium shot,close-up,low angle,high angle,over the shoulder - Unreliable:
cowboy shot,medium long shot,American shot,plan américain - Better than a rare label: name the frame line, for example
framed from the knees up
Two habits raise the hit rate. Put the shot description at the very start of the prompt, before the subject, since models weight early tokens more heavily. Then pair the size with a lens and a depth-of-field cue, because close-up, 85mm, shallow depth of field constrains a result far more than close-up alone. If the framing keeps drifting wider than you asked for, say what the frame edge should cut off.