Visual film techniques are methods by which
camera movements and maneuverings convey the meaning of the scenes. Some of these techniques
that once were exclusively used for film, like Hitchcock's vertigo shot, are now finding their
way into TV productions. You may have noticed on highly technical shows like Burn
Notice, White Collar, or Flash Forward, a camera technique
whereby the subject stays stationary while the background moves dizzingly away (and sometimes
forward again!). This is a vertigo shot and was innovated by Alfred Hitchcok for his famous film
Vertigo, with James Stewart.
Many TV shows, like
The Dick Van Dyke Show, Cheers, Full House, and Hot in
Cleveland, are actually filmed onstage before a "live studio audience,"
like a theater production, thus have a limited scope for visual film techniques. Since
The Great Train Robbery broke the rules, silver screen film has not been
thus limited to a proscenium. TV shows like Charlie's Angels took TV
filming out of doors, following in film's footsteps and borrowing some of movie's film
techniques.
Some other specific film techniques used in TV today are
distance shots, angle shots, dolly and tracking shots, close-up shots, and lighting effects. The
pilot episode of White Collar exemplifies some of these. It opens with many
cuts in a montage series of extreme close-ups of Neil cutting his
hair and shaving. Further shots incorporate angled shots, with
high shots (looking upward) of medium or close-up
shots and with crane shots of the space Neil is in.
Lighting in this montage segment (which points
out the role of precision editing in visual effects) is
side-lighting mixed with top-lighting.
After Neil walks out, a series of pans, dolly shots,
and tracking shots take him from the inside of the
prison to the outside where we see him in an extreme long shot
followed by a depth of field shot with Neil in close-up and the
focus on the prison in the background.
https://www.siggraph.org/
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