Medium Shot
Subject framed from the waist up. The workhorse of dialogue scenes - close enough for performance, wide enough for gesture.
- COINED
- 1910s
- TAXONOMY
- SHOT TYPES
- RELATED
- 4
- TEMPLATES
- 0
The medium shot is the dialogue workhorse. Waist up. Hands often visible. Close enough that the performance reads, wide enough that gesture and posture still count. If you watched a hundred randomly-selected scenes from a hundred randomly-selected films, more than half would be in mediums.
There's a reason: mediums are forgiving. They forgive a slightly off eye-line. They forgive a tiny continuity gap. They forgive an actor scratching their nose between takes. Close-ups punish all of that.
The trap is that mediums can feel inert. A scene made entirely of mediums reads as TV-of-the-week. Mix them with closer coverage on the line that matters, and a wide that anchored the room. The medium is the noun of the sentence - useful, necessary, but not the verb.
Most dialogue. Two-shots where you want both performances readable. Anything where you want the audience to lean in but not yet lock in.
Big emotional beats - go closer. Spectacle - go wider. When the gesture is below the waist, like a hand drawing a knife.
Terms next to this one.
Face fills most of the frame. Used when an emotion is doing more work than a line.
Two characters sharing the frame. The single best way to show a relationship without writing dialogue about it.
The full conversational pattern: speaker, listener, speaker, listener. Editing's most-used hand of cards.
The wide take that covers the whole scene end-to-end. Your safety net when coverage goes sideways.