ABSTRACT
As demonstrated in most holiday and wedding home movies, many people new to camerawork assume that a video of an event is simply shooting a collection of ‘pretty’ or informative images. It is only later when they view the unedited material that they may begin to understand that their collection of individual shots do not flow together and communicate the points they were hoping to make. Watching a sequence of random and erratic images soon becomes tedious and visually distracting if the elementary principle is forgotten or ignored that when viewed, each shot is connected with the preceding and succeeding shot. Good camerawork, as well as providing visually and technically acceptable pictures, is constantly thinking in shot structures. In broadcasting, each shot must help to advance the points being communicated. The collection of shots produced on location will be edited together and pared down to essentials. The editor can only do so much with the material the cameraman provides. Essentially the cameraman (or if present, the director) must impose an elementary structure to the material shot.
