How are angles used in dialogue?
Aim:
On a few occasions, we’ve set out to shoot some dialogue in a tutorial and the director and camera operator just plonk the camera down on some arbitrary spot and shoot from there. No thought is put into the height of the camera, or where it’s been placed. This reminds me of my earlier endeavours in making short films – I had no motivation behind where the camera was put, simply because I didn’t have any idea what my options were. I think this leads to awkward, amateur-looking dialogue exchanges. I’d like to get a better understanding of why one would choose to place a camera in one position over another to cover dialogue, and to get a feel for a few shots used by professionals which I think look good.
Step 1: Watch for some examples
To start my investigation, I watched one episode of the high-budget American TV drama Better Call Saul. While watching, I took screenshots of every single shot in every scene with dialogue, to be analysed later. In the end, I took 418 screenshots – the below image shows just a few of them.
Step 2: Analysing the shots
At this point, I printed off all of the shots from a few of the scenes (like a reverse-engineered storyboard) and made observations when I noticed interesting phenomenons.
Observation 1: A very low angle makes character’s eyelines look up.
The low angle in these shots make the two characters look like they are looking up in the frame. However, the fact that their eyelines aren’t pointing directly at each other doesn’t feel like a problem. This could be because the shots are close mirrors of each other, because they seem to be taken from the same place, or maybe because they are both simply looking in the correct direction.
Observation 2: A slight low angle makes characters look intimidating. A slight high angle makes characters look vulnerable.
In this scene it looks like the man in the suit is puffing out his chest slightly, but this is probably at least partially the result of the camera placement. This is consistent with the age-old adage that a low angle makes someone look powerful and a high angle makes them look weak.
In these shots from another scene, I see this again. The intimidating character is shot with a slight low angle, and the vulnerable character is shot with a slight high angle. This does subtly contribute to establishing the dynamic between the two characters, and builds tension as it feels like the character in green is danger.
Observation 3: I can tell the angle of a shot by comparing two objects on the centre horizontal of the frame.
I was very excited to realise that I could “prove” that one shot has a different angle to another by looking at the relationship between the same two objects across shots. I worked this out from these two sequential shots. In the first one, the character on the left (Nacho) is sitting on the car. His head is below the top of the fence behind him in the frame. In the next shot, Nacho’s head is above the top of the fence! This looked like a clear indication that the angle had changed, and this was easy to confirm with the use of a diagram.
Observation 4: There is a direct link between the tightness of a shot and the height of the camera.
This was the biggest revelation for me. In thinking about the height at which the camera is positioned, I noticed that wider shots always seemed to have a lower camera placement. I also realised that even though the camera seemed to be lower down, the shots didn’t look angled – in fact, they looked straight on. Conversely, I realised that tighter shots generally had the camera positioned higher, as high as eye level with the actors. With some scribbling on some paper, I was very excited to realise that this was a very simple and demonstrable concept. Even though it’s simple, this could be very valuable as a starting point for getting an idea of where to put the camera – higher up for tight shots, and lower down for wide shots.
This shot, one of the widest in the scene, demonstrates this relation by being quite low down but also level.
This shot was a great demonstration of this concept. We start on a medium wide shot, and Mike (the bald man on the right) walks towards the camera. Instead of tilting up, the camera itself moves up to keep Mike in frame while remaining level, as the shot on Mike gets tighter.
Finally, this close up on mike has one of the highest camera placements of the scene.
I was also excited to realise that this concepts means that the camera will always be below (and sometimes well below) the eye level of the actors for almost any shot!
Step 3: Working more things out through drawing diagrams
During and after looking through all the shots from the episode of Better Call Saul, I drew many diagrams to try to wrap my head around the concepts I was coming up with. Here’s a photo of all of those notes, but I won’t try to explain them all (they were a work in progress!). Below, I’ll describe some of the ideas that were the most developed.
Finding 1: A longer focal length lens is more consistent with it’s angle.
As shown in these diagrams, the upper and lower bounds of a shot with a short focal lens will have a much higher and lower “angle” to them than the actual level of the camera. This separation becomes less profound the longer the focal length, until a theoretical point on a camera with an infinitely long focal length, in which the whole shot would be one line going straight in the direction the camera is pointing in.
When applied to an angle, you can see that a longer focal length lens will make the angle more consistent between differently placed subjects in the shot. A short focal length lens can result in the shot having a “high angle” on one subject when the shot is in fact a low angle, with the camera pointing upwards. I think these shots with short focal lengths making objects’ relationships less “directional” is more common in amateur productions. I found that in the episode of Better Call Saul, an effort was made to keep things that are in a line, presented in a line.
In this shot, a low angle is used from below the level of Kim’s head. This makes us look “up” to both her and Saul. This should could have easily been shot from above the level Kim’s head, but then the consistent direction would no longer be preserved and this effect would be lost.
Finding 2: The “Cones”
Using a lot of maths involving angles and similar triangles, I came up with a theory that there are cone-like regions, like the ones depicted below, within which you’re able to shoot certain shots from (such as close ups or long shots) if you want to restrict the tilt to within a certain range. The up-down height of the cones depends on how much of an angle you’re willing to shoot at, and the left-right length of the shaded “useable” region is determined by the range of focal length lenses available to you. I may go into further detail in explaining and exploring this theory in the future if I find it to be useful in my studies.
Finding 3: Confirming relation between tightness and camera height
To check this theory I came at earlier, I cut out some of the shots I liked and arranged them on a graph – shots with a higher camera placement were put higher up on the page, and tighter shots were put further to the right.
This produced a trend going up of closer shots having the camera positioned higher up, confirming my theory from earlier. There were some outliers which had more of a low angle than appeared standard. I think this is because this scene in particular featured two powerful characters, and they are being conveyed as such through the use of a low angle.
Step 4: The Experiment
After all this theorising, I decided I’d like to have a try at recreating some of the shots from the scenes that I considered useful or interesting. I chose the the shots in the three scenes depicted below.
Here are all the shots I recreated, side-by-side with the original, with my comments.
This shot works well. I could have made it wider, and also used a longer focal length to narrow the depth of field. I was restricted by the space I was in, which is often the case. A good filmmaker should be able to improvise to work around these kinds of problems.
This shot was duplicated very well. The low angle is very exciting.
This is another exciting low angle shot. As I predicted, the camera was in the same position for this close up as it was in the medium shot.
I think I replicated the angles well in this shot. I usually don’t like seeing the roof in a shot of an actor, but it is clearly a stylistic choice here and it looks bold.
This shot is very cool. I ended up using an angle that was slightly too low – the original shot is more level than the rest of the shots in this scene. However, the positioning of the character in the middle of the frame still looks very nice.
I didn’t get the horizontal angle quite right here. The camera should have been closer to the female character to be more in line with the characters. I think showing two characters more straight on, with the camera perpendicular to their relative position, is a dull and common amateur look.
I struggled with this shot because I couldn’t get far away enough to get a depth of field that shallow. I did have the aperture completely open and with a filter to minimise the depth of field, but the original filmmakers clearly had much more space to work with in this scene.
I think this shot of mine looks really good – it’s one of my favourites. However, the depth of field still isn’t quite shallow enough to match the original, because of the space available to me. My actors were likely also too close, making it harder to have one in and one out of focus.
This was one of the weaker shots of the exercise for me. In my low quality printouts, I couldn’t see that Kim’s shoulder was meant to be in the shot. I also ended up shooting my actor too far to the centre of the frame, and not filling enough of it vertically. I think that I should have had the camera positioned further to the left, meaning my actor would be facing relatively more towards the camera.
The lighting difference between the two versions of this shot are so significant that it’s hard to compare them. Like the last shot, I perhaps should have moved the camera across to the right, closer to where the actor was looking.
This shot was quite well done. I could have used a higher angle.
This shot was also quite well done. It could have been improved with a shallower depth of field if my environment allowed for it.
This was my recreation of the shot in which Mike moves towards the camera, and the camera moves higher. I didn’t quite go far enough – the actor on the right didn’t get close enough to the camera, and the camera didn’t rise high enough. I wasn’t able to rise the camera very high or very smoothly while just using it handheld, so I’d like to ask Robin how a movement like this would be done in a professional context.
This shot was fairly well replicated. My angle may have slightly been too low, or I may have been using a focal length that was slightly too long.
I needed to position the camera a bit higher and use a higher angle for this shot. I can see now that the original shot was too high for my handheld set-up, and I would have been able to pull this off more easily with a tripod.
I should have used a longer focal length lens for this shot. I can see that in the original version, the characters appear to be brought much closer together than they are in my one. In addition, I can see that my angle was too low.
The last shot of the day was also the one with the least accurate angle. The camera should have been significantly higher, but without a tripod this was almost impossible. Now I know – if I want closeups with two heads at about the same level in the frame, the camera is going to have to be very high.
Step 5: Conclusion
This exercise has made me much more confident in my ability to shoot dialogue scenes. It has given me some great ideas on how to shoot dialogue in bold and interesting ways. It has also given me insight into where amateur filmmakers often go wrong. These include not being confident in or even aware of their use of high and low angles, as well as having shots which are too perpendicular to the scene rather than being closer in with the action. I am honestly very excited to be able to apply this new perspective to my future works.