Master Shot

One wide angle holds the entire scene from the first line to the last. Everything that happens in the room happens inside that frame, so the editor always has somewhere to go.

It is insurance as much as composition. Coverage that fails, a performance that changes between takes, a line that has to be moved: the master absorbs all of it.

Wide enough to contain every position an actor will take during the scene, held for the full length of the action. Nothing in the blocking is allowed to leave the frame.

A moving master does the same job with the camera travelling, which keeps the wide coverage and adds momentum. The rule is unchanged. If the camera is moving, it still has to be wherever the action goes.

Shoot it first, before the coverage, so the rest of the day matches it. Use it as the backbone of any scene with more than two people in it.

It matters less when a scene is two people sitting still. At that point the wide is a courtesy rather than a necessity.

An establishing shot introduces a place and leaves. A master shot stays for the whole scene and is meant to be returned to.

A wide shot is the framing. A master shot is that framing given a job and a full-length take.

Martin Scorsese takes Henry Hill through the kitchen entrance of the Copacabana in Goodfellas (1990) in one unbroken travelling take, which covers the entire sequence with no cut available. Alfred Hitchcock pushed the idea to its limit in Rope (1948), where the takes run as long as a film magazine allows.

The clip stops before the action does, which leaves the scene uncovered. Ask for the full action inside one continuous take and keep the shot list short enough to fit the duration you are paying for.

The other failure is a frame that crops someone out halfway through. Name every person in the scene and say all of them stay in frame throughout.