Close-up
A close-up or closeup in filmmaking, television production, still photography, and the comic strip medium is a type of shot that tightly frames a person or object.
Most early filmmakers, such as Thomas Edison, Auguste and Louis Lumière and Georges Méliès, tended not to use close-ups and preferred to frame their subjects in long shots, similar to the stage.
For example, one of Griffith's short films, The Lonedale Operator (1911), makes significant use of a close-up of a wrench that a character pretends is a gun.
They are often employed as cutaways from a more distant shot to show detail, such as characters' emotions or some intricate activity with their hands.
For a director, deliberately avoiding close-ups may create in the audience an emotional distance from the subject matter[citation needed].
At the close of Sunset Boulevard (1950), the main character, a faded star under the delusion that she is making a triumphant return to acting, declaims melodramatically, "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."
The terminology varies between countries and even different companies, but in general, these are: When the close-up is used in the shooting, the subject should not be put in exactly the middle of the frame.
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Luncheon of the Boating Party
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir
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