Over-the-shoulder shot
Also known as: OTS, over the shoulder
A shot framed past a foreground figure toward what they are looking at, which puts a viewer behind the subject rather than beside them.
Updated
What it means
An over-the-shoulder shot has two subjects. The person in the foreground and whatever they are facing, and the relationship between the two is the whole content of the frame.
In action footage it is usually the view down a run. A rider at the edge of frame and the line ahead of them, which explains both the feature and the decision about to be made.
It is a third-person framing rather than a point of view. A POV footage clip shows what somebody saw; this shows somebody about to see it, which is a different kind of statement.
How it works in practice
The foreground has to be soft or small. A figure filling half the frame in sharp focus competes with the thing behind them, so standing slightly back solves it better than any Aperture setting would.
It makes an excellent establishing beat. Placed before a run, it shows the feature from the rider position, which is what an Establishing shot does without leaving the ground.
A second camera makes it easy. One person filming from behind the rider at the drop-in produces this naturally, and it asks for nothing beyond somebody standing in the right place.
What to watch out for
Screen direction is easy to break with it. Shooting past a rider in one direction and then cutting to a side angle from the other side crosses the 180-degree line in the clearest possible way.
The foreground figure dates the shot. Clothing, a helmet and a backpack are all in frame permanently, which matters for anything meant to be used across more than one season.
It reads as a setup rather than action. Nothing much happens in the shot itself, so it belongs at the start of a section rather than in the middle of a sequence of runs.
How RawClip handles it
Framings like this score as setup rather than as action, which tends to place them at the front of a section where their job actually works. The run itself cuts better from angles where the speed of the run reads clearly.