Point of View

The camera takes a character's position so the audience sees what they see. For a few seconds the viewer stops watching somebody and starts occupying them.

It only works as a pair. A shot of somebody looking, then the thing they are looking at, and the audience joins the two. On its own the same frame is just a shot of a room.

The lens sits at the character's eye height and points where they are pointed. Movement matches theirs, so a POV from somebody walking carries the rhythm of walking.

The frame does not have to be handheld. A calm character gives a calm POV. What has to match is the physical situation: height, direction, and whatever the eyes are doing.

Sound is half of it. A POV that carries the character's hearing, muffled underwater or narrowed by an injury, lands harder than one that only changes the camera position.

Use it on a discovery, on a threat approaching, and on any moment where the audience should be inside the fear rather than watching it.

Avoid stringing them together. A run of POV shots with no cut back to the person loses its owner, and the audience stops knowing whose eyes they are in.

An over-the-shoulder shot keeps the character in frame, so the audience watches them look. A POV removes them and shows only what they see.

The test is whether any part of the looker is in the picture. A shoulder in the corner means over-the-shoulder. Nothing of them at all means POV.

Alfonso Cuaron moves the camera through Ryan Stone's helmet in Gravity (2013) so a wide shot becomes her view without a cut. Steven Spielberg puts the lens at eye height in the water on Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan (1998), and the sound drops away with it.

Models return a third person shot of the character, because a person in frame is the safer answer. Say the camera shows what the subject sees, with no part of them visible.

The second failure is a still POV from a moving person. Name the motion: matching their steps, turning as they turn, and say where the eyes go.