Of all the technical and creative decisions a cinematographer must make, I believe knowing where to place the camera within a scene and why is the most important. For me, it's also a decision I’ve been grappling with these past two years while completing my Masters at AFTRS.
Where the camera is positioned within the story world dictates the window through which the audience experiences the narrative — the point of view (Foss, 1994). Practically speaking, this decision is tied not only to a specific spatial position, but effects (and is affected by) performance, composition and framing, lighting, camera movement, set design and dressing, editing, sound — practically all filmmaking choices!
Point of view at a surface level can be defined as ‘what we see from a certain location’. In the context of a film, if we share a character’s point of view, we see what they see — their optical point of view.
Applying a literary definition of point of view, we can define it as “the ways in which a film can systematically structure an audience’s overall epistemic access to narrative” (Wilson, 1986, p.3). To simplify: how knowledge of the narrative world is controlled and communicated to the audience. I’d argue that this is where the concepts of an objective or subjective camera tie in, which I’ll place under the umbrella term of emotional point of view. But going back again to Wilson’s definition of point of view, this idea of the way a film systematically structures access to narrative strikes me as very similar to the idea of coverage.
Applying a literary definition of point of view, we can define it as “the ways in which a film can systematically structure an audience’s overall epistemic access to narrative” (Wilson, 1986, p.3). To simplify: how knowledge of the narrative world is controlled and communicated to the audience. I’d argue that this is where the concepts of an objective or subjective camera tie in, which I’ll place under the umbrella term of emotional point of view. But going back again to Wilson’s definition of point of view, this idea of the way a film systematically structures access to narrative strikes me as very similar to the idea of coverage.
Coverage is the methodology of translating a script into shots that will allow a scene to be cut together. More deeply, it’s an orientation tool to position an audience both physically within a scene, but also emotionally through “our implied relationship to the character and action” (Pye, 2000, p.2). And being a sequence of images, coverage navigates an audience through the scene; for example, establishing the geography of a space in a wide, or privileges us to a private moment with our protagonist, unseen by other characters.