A video essay on camera movement but instead of focusing on tracking, panning, tilting, dollying, handheld and all those other technical types I'm sure you know backwards, my dear viewer, we'll treat the subject from another point of view.

In his book, "On Film-Making", Alexander Mackendrick wrote that camera movement can be split into two kinds: Motivated and Unmotivated. Based on this dichotomy I developed a longer list (mostly made up of subsets of what would likely be considered Unmotivated).

Here we'll think in terms of Centers of Attention. I made up the acronym COAT to make it snappier. That's the specific element onscreen the director wants you to focus your eyes on (the focal point). Keep that in mind when the camera moves.

In a Motivated motion, the camera Follows a COAT. That’s why I call it the Following camera. The Unmotivated camera does not move according to a COAT. Most of the time we are left without a COAT while it Seeks one outside the frame, that’s why I call it the Seeking camera. There are many other types of camera movement that don’t Follow a COAT but don’t leave us without one, and we’ll go over them in this video.

00:00 Camera Movement
00:47 Motivated & Unmotivated
01:45 Following
03:31 Seeking
04:54 Other types of the Unmotivated
05:17 Revealing
06:02 Enlarging & Reducing
06:40 Including & Excluding
07:08 Arcing
07:33 Nothing
08:18 Combinations
09:45 X-Ray Vision camera movement
10:45 Outro


There's also camera roll, right? Doesn't really seem to fit anywhere here. Let's pretend it's a subset of Arcing.

Oh, and that shot from "The Asphalt Jungle". If you think about it, it's very similar to those Arcing/Including close-ups Spielberg loves. But this time the camera moves down the actor’s body to end on his hand instead of remaining on his head, making it similar to Revealing (down instead of the usual up), but since he's out of focus I don't think it should count as Revealing (a rule I made up when thinking about this shot). Because during the Arcing motion around Louis Calhern we have no COAT, that would qualify as Seeking. Just don't forget that the motion begins by briefly Following. So, I'd say we first Follow then Seek. That's it. That Seeking motion pretends to be Revealing (down Calhern's body), Arcing (around him) and Including (Marilyn Monroe sleeping).

And since you’ve read this far...
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