Extreme close-up
Also known as: ECU, detail shot
A shot tight enough that the subject fills the frame completely, used for texture and detail rather than for showing what happened.
Updated
What it means
An extreme close-up abandons context entirely. A hand on a grip, a boot clicking into a binding, water running off a board, with nothing in frame to say where any of it is happening.
It is a texture shot rather than an action shot. Nothing in it reads as a moment in a sequence, and its job is to break up a run of wide shots with something tactile.
It sits one step beyond a Close-up shot, and the difference matters. A close-up still shows a face or an object in a place; this shows a surface and nothing else at all.
How it works in practice
It belongs between sections rather than inside them. A detail shot after a run gives a viewer a beat to settle, which is what an Insert shot does structurally in a longer edit.
Focus is the whole difficulty. At this distance the depth of field is a few centimetres, so a camera with Fixed focus has to be positioned precisely rather than aimed approximately.
Two or three per edit is plenty. They are quick to film, easy to overuse, and a sequence with six of them reads as a product advertisement rather than a session.
What to watch out for
There is nothing in one for scoring to measure. A static detail shot contains no action at all, so Shot scoring ranks it below everything else and it has to be asked for rather than found.
Movement ruins them faster than anything else. A mounted camera at this distance turns a small shake into a frame of blur, and almost nothing survives on a moving subject.
They date an edit when they follow a trend. A particular kind of slow detail shot belongs to a particular few years, which is worth knowing before building a style around it.
How RawClip handles it
Detail shots are kept and used around the action rather than discarded, since a sequence of nothing but peaks is tiring to watch. Asking for them as a deliberate section is more reliable than hoping the scoring places them well.