Freeze Frame

The image stops dead on one frame and holds. Everything the shot was doing is suspended, and the audience is left looking at a photograph of a moment that has not finished.

It is the most direct way a film can point at something. A freeze says this is the image to keep, and it often arrives with narration, a title or a name.

One frame repeats for as long as the hold lasts. The camera stops with it, which is the part that gets missed: a freeze with a drifting camera is a different technique.

Length decides the meaning. A held beat of half a second reads as punctuation. Four seconds reads as a full stop, and a freeze that runs into the credits reads as the end of the story.

Grain and noise freeze too, so the image goes completely inert. Some films reintroduce a little grain over the hold to keep it alive, which is a choice rather than a requirement.

Use it to introduce a character, to mark the moment a narrator steps in, and to end a scene or a film on an image that should not resolve.

Avoid it mid action, where a stop with no reason behind it reads as a playback fault.

Frozen in motion stops the world and lets one thing carry on moving. A freeze frame stops everything, including the one thing.

Bullet time also stops the action, and it keeps the camera travelling. If anything at all is still moving, the shot is not a freeze frame.

Francois Truffaut ends The 400 Blows (1959) on a boy at the edge of the sea, freezing the image as he turns to the camera so the story stops without finishing. Martin Scorsese freezes the action repeatedly through Goodfellas (1990) to let the narration catch up, and Danny Boyle introduces each character in Trainspotting (1996) on a held frame with a name over it.

The camera keeps drifting while the subject freezes, which is bullet time rather than a freeze frame. Say all motion stops, including the camera.

The second failure is a slow motion crawl instead of a stop. Ask for the image to freeze dead on one frame and to hold there.