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Hi, this is Kevin Lindenmuth, in for Expert Village. I will be talking about camera angles
and camera moves. An aerial shot is, of course, from the air. It can be from a plane. Usually,
though, it's from a helicopter. You see this a lot, you know, at the beginning of movies.
I was just watching "Lost Boys" the other day and at the beginning of that whole movie,
going over the ocean is just this shot of going over the ocean until they hit the coast.
And you know that's from a helicopter. It's a very cool, kind of, over the head, very
fast type of shot. So the aerial shots, again they show location. You're moving with the
camera so it really puts you in the scene. It's taking you along with it. You see it
in war movies all the time, aerial shots, just because, usually there are lots of planes
and such in the war movies. So it's kind of a point of view type of thing and also, documentaries.
I saw this one documentary that dealt with birds and migration and of course, it was
all aerial shots because it is just necessary, you know, in order to capture that whole thing.
Again, as with any of the other angles, camera moves, camera shots, it's used for a very
specific purpose. In "Star Wars" for example, with all the ships going back and forth and
battling, you know, those are all aerial shots. Of course, those are computer generated, but
you know that is basically kind of gives you the sense of what an aerial shot is. You know,
90% of the time, aerial shots are from helicopters, so those are definitely money shots as well,
just as with the crane shots are. It adds production value to the production.