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About Africa

In film, a shot is a continuous strip of motion picture film, created of a series of frames, that runs for an uninterrupted period of time. Shots are generally filmed with a single camera and can be of any duration. Frames, shots, scenes, and sequences form a hierarchy of units fundamental to many tasks in the creation of moving-image works.

The distance from the camera to the subject greatly affects the narrative power of a shot. The three basic kinds of shots are long shots, medium shots, and close-ups; more specific examples include the extreme long shot, the aerial shot, the bird's eye shot, the crane shot, the establishing shot, the freeze frame shot, the insert shot, the master shot, the over the shoulder shot, the point of view shot, and the two shot. There is even an American shot, a characterization from French film criticism for a type of shot in certain American films of the 1930s and 1940s.

The etymology of the term "shot" derives from the early days of film production when camera were hand-cranked. Hand-cranked cameras operated similarly to the hand-cranked machine guns of that era. Therefore, one "shot" film the way one would "shoot" bullets from a machine gun.