The Filmmaker's Eye

extreme close up

The extreme close up allows you to concentrate the audience’s attention on a tiny detail of a character or on small objects. While the close up lets the audience see nuances of a performance that would normally be lost in wider shots, the extreme close up can effectively isolate even smaller, single visual details from the rest of the scene. If the detail is extremely small, sometimes these shots are obtained with the use of specialized lenses, and are called macro shots, but narratively, they still function as extreme close ups. Using an extreme close up to frame a small object or a detail of a character instantly generates the expectation that what is being shown is important and meaningful to the narrative in some way (an ...