Why not learn from the masters? Thanks to this video from Studio Binder, and writer/director Arnon Z. Shorr’s spot-on insight, we can learn a few tricks to apply to our writing (and filmmaking). 

You’ll have to go over to YouTube to watch this one, but it’s worth it!

Stephen Spielberg’s Directing Style Revealed Through the POV Shot by Arnon Z. Shorr

Okay, you know I’ll boil it down for you, but you should really watch the video, too. It’s under six minutes and has great clips from Spielberg and Hitchcock movies to demonstrate its points. 

Bottomline… Hitchcock loved to use Point-of-View (POV) shots to make us feel what the character felt. Spielberg uses Point-of-Thought (POT) shots of the actor’s face as they react to something off-screen, so we feel their thoughts. Both are pretty cool filming tricks, and used in a script — without directing the director — would really pull in a reader. 

How do you write a shot like the above without directing the director? For one thing, you don’t say “we see,” and you use it sparingly — where it really counts in your storyline. If either were in one of my scripts, it would be it’s own paragraph in the description that says what the actor is either seeing (for POV) or doing (for POT). Try it, and see how it affects readers. 

Image courtesy of Pixabay and creator #12019, thanks!