Glossary
Comprehensive glossary of filmmaking terms, concepts, and techniques.
Showing 36 terms
A
2Arc Shot
A shot where the camera moves in a curved path around a subject, keeping consistent distance.
Audio
The sound component of a film, encompassing dialogue, music, sound effects, and ambient atmosphere.
B
3Bollywood
The Hindi-language film industry based in Mumbai, India, producing more films than any other national cinema except Nigeria.
Beat
The smallest unit of dramatic action in a scene, representing a single change in character intention or emotion.
Blaxploitation
A cycle of 1970s Black-led genre films aimed at Black urban audiences, blending action, crime, and soul soundtracks.
C
3Concert Film
A film documenting a live musical performance, typically combining multi-camera concert footage with backstage material or interviews.
Chain of Title
The documented legal history of a film's ownership rights from original creator to current rights holder.
Coda
A brief closing passage after the story's resolution, providing a final emotional or thematic beat.
E
2Epilogue
A closing scene after the main story ends, showing what happened to the characters later.
Extreme Close-Up
A shot framed on a single feature or small detail, isolating it entirely from its surrounding context.
L
2Leitmotif
A recurring musical theme associated with a character, place, object, or concept that evolves with the story.
Lap Dissolve
A dissolve of extended duration where two images overlap long enough to create a sustained superimposition.
M
5Match Cut
An edit that joins two shots by matching a visual element, shape, movement, or action across the cut.
Melodrama
A dramatic mode that heightens emotional intensity through exaggerated conflict, moral polarisation, and expressive music.
Mockumentary
A fiction film or series shot in documentary style to satirise its subject or the documentary form itself.
Montage
A sequence of short shots edited together to condense time, convey information, or create emotional effect through juxtaposition.
Motif
A recurring element that accumulates meaning through repetition across a film.
N
4New Hollywood
The American film movement of the late 1960s and 1970s in which young directors gained creative control from studios.
New Wave
The French film movement of the late 1950s and 1960s that rejected studio convention for personal, low-budget, location-shot cinema.
Nickelodeon
An early American cinema venue charging five cents for short film programmes, circa 1905 to 1915.
Non-Diegetic Sound
Sound heard only by the audience, not by characters, with no source within the story world.
S
7Score
Original music composed specifically for a film, forming the non-diegetic musical layer of the soundtrack.
Sequence
A series of scenes linked by a common narrative thread, forming a distinct dramatic unit.
Soundtrack
The complete audio track of a film, or the commercial album of music from that film released separately.
Spaghetti Western
A cycle of Italian-produced western films made in the 1960s and 1970s, often shot in Spain, characterised by stylised violence and Ennio Morricone's distinctive scores.
Static Shot
A shot in which the camera remains completely still, with no pan, tilt, zoom, or physical movement.
Surrealism
An art and cinema movement using dreamlike imagery and irrational juxtapositions to access unconscious truth.
Swish Pan
An extremely rapid horizontal camera rotation that creates a blurred smear, used as a transition or punctuation.