Ultimately, these decisions of coverage and point of view are what excite me most about cinematography, the ability to affect an audience emotionally based on decisions as simple as the location of the camera.
In practice, while these decisions can seem simple or obvious in hindsight, they can be daunting to make in the moment during a block through, let alone in a documentary setting.

And while there’s a wide body of existing film theory literature discussing point of view, it's largely philosophical and approaches the topic in reflection of completed sequences, void of the filmmaking process and decisions that resulted in the refined ‘point of view’ that the film shares. In particular, there’s little practical discussion about coverage choices, or how individual technical and aesthetic cinematographic techniques work together to create it.

When it comes to practicing cinematographers, coverage is always preceded by ‘enough’ coverage rather than ‘the right’ coverage; and point of view discussion is often difficult to explain, glossed over as ‘intuition’ or oversimplified rules that hide a deeper thought process. My aim with this exegesis is to bridge a gap in this area for early career cinematographers like myself, who haven’t had enough time behind the camera for this process to naturally become intuitive. More specifically, I want to deconstruct the myriad of technical and aesthetic considerations a cinematographer has at their disposal within the arsenal of visual language, with a particular focus on exploiting emotional point of view for greater intimacy and emotional effect on the audience.