Shot language
The working vocabulary: how close, where the camera stands, when it moves, and what the frame admits. Every technique here gets a diagram, an honest account of what it does to an audience, and the trap it sets when it becomes a reflex. The diagrams are drawn for this site, and the examples are clips from real films, because a shot only means something once you have seen it work.
A NOTEGrammar, not rules
None of this is a law. Low angles do not automatically confer power, Dutch angles do not automatically create unease, and a close-up on an actor with nothing to play is just a big face. What these techniques give you is a set of expectations the audience already has, built by a century of films they have absorbed without studying. You can satisfy those expectations or break them, but you cannot pretend they are not there.
So use this page as a checklist in prep and as a diagnostic afterward: when a scene is not working, the answer is often that the sizes never changed, the camera height never took a position, or every shot admitted exactly the same amount of world. Then go and watch the clips, because reading about a rack focus teaches you nothing compared to seeing one land.