Writing · 2020, edited 2026
Connected coverage: where to put the camera, and why
Of all the technical and creative decisions a cinematographer makes, I believe knowing where to put the camera, and why, is the most important. It’s also the one I grappled with most during my Masters at AFTRS, across the three films I shot in my final year: Dust Cloud, written and directed by Trudi Refshauge, a light-hearted story with a dog as its hero; Adam Finney’s observational documentary Where is my Darling?; and testing for Jenna Sutch’s Death Doula, which COVID had pushed back to the following year. What drew me to all three was their focus, both narratively and emotionally, on character.
Point of view and coverage
Where the camera sits in the story world decides the window the audience experiences the story through: the point of view. Practically speaking, that decision isn’t just about a position in space. It affects (and is affected by) performance, composition, lighting, camera movement, set design, editing and sound. Practically all filmmaking choices!
On the surface, point of view means what we see from a certain spot. If we share a character’s point of view, we see what they see. But there’s a deeper definition from literary theory: “the ways in which a film can systematically structure an audience’s overall epistemic access to narrative” (Wilson, 1986). To simplify, it’s how a film controls what the audience knows, and when. I’d argue that’s where the idea of an objective or subjective camera comes in, which I think of as emotional point of view.
That idea of structuring access to the story struck me as very similar to coverage: translating a script into shots that can be cut together. Coverage positions an audience physically in a scene, and emotionally, through what Pye (2000) calls “our implied relationship to the character and action”. A wide establishes the geography of a space. A close-up can let us into a private moment with our protagonist that no other character sees.
These decisions are what excite me most about cinematography: the ability to move an audience emotionally with something as simple as where the camera is placed. In hindsight they can look obvious, but in the moment, during a block-through, let alone on a documentary, they can be daunting. And when you ask working cinematographers about it, coverage usually comes down to getting “enough” rather than “the right” coverage, and point of view gets explained as intuition. That’s honest, but it doesn’t help much if you haven’t had the years behind the camera for that intuition to form. So I tried to take the decision apart.
Five ingredients
I wasn’t trying to write a recipe for perfect coverage. The aim was to understand the ingredients a cinematographer has to work with, through my own projects, reading, and interviews with working cinematographers.
It built on a video essay on point of view I made in 2019, which is where this research started.
I came to think of connection as an emotional mindset, a spectrum from subjective to objective. (Philosophically, even an “objective” shot has subjectively squeezed a three-dimensional world into a frame and a moment, but I digress.) A subjective camera has what Christopher Doyle calls the “energy of the shot”, a presence. An objective camera doesn’t react to the emotion of a scene, and often watches from a distance, outside the character’s point of view. Where a scene sits on that spectrum guides which coverage keeps that vantage point and which breaks it. Robbie Ryan BSC and Andrea Arnold are a great example: they set rules for how close the camera stays to their characters, and those rules shape every coverage decision.
From that, I grouped the techniques into five.
Optical point of view
The most obvious way to connect an audience to a character is to show what they see, first-person style. Used for a whole film it can be alienating, and you lose the actor’s performance. Used selectively, it can be scary, experiential, and revealing, especially when it gives context to a reaction shot.
On Death Doula we experimented with cutting flashbacks against reaction shots from the present scene. One interesting thing we found was that the flashbacks didn’t need to be optically from the character’s point of view. They were close enough that we stayed attached to her anyway. Maybe my category was too strict, and what matters is less a character’s exact line of sight than the context of what they’re looking at. Either way, these shots work best paired with a reaction, which turns an informational shot into a look inside someone’s head.
Proximity
Physical closeness between camera and character was one of the first things I discovered as a budding cinematographer. Moving closer gives a character more presence, pushes the background away, and lets the camera stay still while the frame picks up an actor’s smallest gestures. Large-format sensors push that separation even further.
It’s also hard to achieve. Earle Dresner ACS talked to me about the conundrum of getting close without crowding a performance. On Dust Cloud and Where is my Darling? it was difficult for exactly those reasons. Animals limit how close a camera can get, and on a documentary it’s near impossible without a willing subject and time, something that only really came as filming with the documentary’s subject, Lanz, was ending.
For Death Doula, Jenna and I referenced Fish Tank, American Honey, Babyteeth and Normal People from day one, and proximity was high on our list.
Jenna was also playing our lead, Annie. Our tests had some magical moments, and we both came to the same conclusion: those moments work best used selectively, for points of deep emotional connection, so they mean more and don’t get in the way of performance. A close shot puts the lens right in an actor’s space, which is the crowding Earle warned about. Saving it for a few moments gives the actor room to play the rest of the scene without a camera in their face.
What I got wrong on Dust Cloud
The other side of proximity is where the audience sits across a whole scene, and this is something I hadn’t thought through enough on Dust Cloud.
My key visual reference was Babe. The way it embodied the animals’ perspective, through point of view and reaction shots, felt like the perfect strategy for a film about a dog, so my approach was simple: keep the camera at the dog’s eye level, always get the dog’s reaction, keep the dog present in the humans’ coverage, and match eyelines between them.
What I missed was the nuance in Andrew Lesnie’s approach on Babe. Its coverage is anchored to the animals. Red Dog, by contrast, anchors its coverage to the humans. That difference starts in the script. Babe is a film about animals, told by the animals. Red Dog is a film about a heroic dog, told by the people who met him. Dust Cloud was a film about a dog, told through his interactions with the farmers, so its point of view shifted between what the dog sees, what the humans say when he isn’t around, and an all-seeing view that drives the climax.
I had taken a Babe approach when a Red Dog approach suited the story better.
I now think of perspective in layers. At the core is the perspective of the script. On top sit the visual layers of character perspective and objectivity, and then music and sound shape it further. If those layers don’t line up, the perspective gets cloudy and muddled, as it did on Dust Cloud. Talking through perspective more clearly with the director, and storyboarding key scenes, might have avoided that. When I spoke to Geoffrey Hall ACS, who shot Red Dog, he had plenty more on the realities of working with animals.
Composition and framing
Everyone has a favourite focal length. Bresson had his 50mm, Haneke the 35mm. At the same shot size, wider lenses tend to feel more subjective and longer lenses more objective, which is proximity again. But across a whole film that fades away. Ken Loach shoots long and distant, and audiences still connect deeply with his characters. As Loach puts it, “I consider it a great privilege to be the observer”.
So I’d argue composition and framing do more than focal length to set an emotional point of view: who’s bigger in the frame, who’s cut off, and what’s left out. On Dust Cloud, working with animals and around an operating sheep farm, I missed chances to use size in the frame to connect the audience more deeply to our dog. Varying lenses and framing across a protagonist’s coverage can also widen the emotional range of the point of view.
Movement
The word “emotion” comes from the Latin “ēmovēre”, to move. I think there are two main ways camera movement connects to a character: moving because the character moves, and what Albright (2011) calls “cinematographic embodiment”, where the operator’s own body and reactions are recorded along with the subject.
On Where is my Darling? the plan was to film several water deliveries over the ten-day shoot. Repetition would let us anticipate the action and have the camera in the right place at the right time, instead of reacting or chasing. To Be and To Have was our aspiration, with its beautiful stillness and simplicity.
Only one delivery happened before our protagonist ran out of water. The scene we got balances steady observational shots with more nervous reactive ones, as the camera embodied my anxiety that there might not be another delivery. Keeping my composure while operating is something I’m still working on, but the contrast adds a rawness to that scene that suits its mood.
On Death Doula, Jenna and I experimented with feeling states and “playable actions” (Soloway, 2018), giving emotional direction to the cinematographer the way you would to an actor. Practically, that meant lighting locations for 180 or even 360 degrees so actors could move freely, and moving away from the traditional master-scene method towards a freer documentary style, shooting coverage in passes (dialogue, reaction, freeform) so there was enough for the edit while the camera stayed free to respond.
Time and focus
Shallow focus isolates a character, but where the focus sits, and when it moves, also guides the eye and can stretch or rush a moment. Off-speed recording can add another layer. Christopher Doyle changes speed at “decisive”, “epiphanal” or “revelatory” moments, and his slow motion in In the Mood for Love stirs feelings in me that are hard to define. These are the most intuitive ingredients of the five, and the ones I had most to discover through practice. Doyle again: “Focus is not a technical detail. It is a feeling.”
Conclusions
In searching for where to place the camera, I found it’s the why that matters more. My analytical approach ended up with more feeling states and intuitions than I could fit into words. I should have guessed that something as complex as emotion, though universally understood, can’t be broken down into individual technical choices.
Still, the research gave me real insight into my own process and into how other cinematographers search for the same answers. Working with directors taught me how much story matters above everything else, and how important it is to communicate clearly about point of view and emotion. Earle Dresner put it simply: analyse, analyse, analyse, and then when you get on set, be willing to throw it all away.
For Death Doula, we settled on a definition of the camera’s point of view, borrowing a phrase from director Lenny Abrahamson: a “delicate watchfulness”.
Postscript: shooting Death Doula (2026)
Death Doula shot in early 2021, between COVID lockdowns.
COVID rules shaped the schedule and how close the camera could get to the actors. The delays gave us plenty of time to rehearse, and the opportunity to keep refining the script and scenes right up to the shoot.
With Jenna directing and playing the lead, I often made calls as both cinematographer and director while she was in front of the camera, without the chance to talk them through in the moment. Looking back, a director’s eye beside the camera would have helped: someone to hold the shape of each scene while Jenna stayed inside it. Even so, the shoot did what we set out to test, which was what happens when the actors come first. The scenes were improvised and built around them, and the camera followed and responded to the action rather than working to a fixed shot list. For a story this personal to Jenna, that “delicate watchfulness” felt like the right place for the camera to be.
This is an edited version of “Connected Coverage”, my web exegesis for the AFTRS Master of Arts Screen in 2020. Read the original, with the interviews, clips and full references.