Cinematic Points of View

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While watching films an average person doesn’t think about what they are seeing in the technical sense of why and how it is being shown this way. When one starts to break the down how the point of view of the camera changes throughout a film, they are looking at the cinematic points of view. The cinematic points of views are the different ways the movie camera sees the action taking place before it. The Objective point of view is when the camera acts as a window for the audience to look through. Most of the time using a static camera, the audience can watch from a distance without participating in the action. The objective camera puts an emotional distance in between the camera and the subject, and does not interpret action but merely records it. This point of view is apparent in the opening scene of Moonrise Kingdom where the camera pans around the the rooms of the house, each shot acting like a window looking in on the family. This point of view allows the audience to pinpoint and see subtle but possibly significant details on our own. Too much of the objective point of view will bore the audience, so it is a common pattern in film to switch from the objective point of view to other points of view. Subjective point of view brings the viewers into the action and gives us a visual viewpoint from a character participating in the action. This causes the viewer to share that emotion with the character. When the audience is brought in like that their experience becomes much more intense and intimate as they get involved in the action. This point of view is attained using a moving camera that forces us into seeing exactly what the character is seeing. In the film Battle Los Angeles, the heart pounding war scenes were speckled with subjective points of views from the soldiers running through rubble and debris. This helped raise the excitement. It is

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