Shot framing

What it does

Footage in a box: the clip sits in a bordered box on the set, the line beneath it — the archive-clip look of a news set, with the set still visible around it.

Host and graphic: the speaker in a third of the frame and, beside them, a headline stacked large with up to three pictures from the episode as tilted, bordered cards — the over-the-shoulder graphic of a news desk.

Each line of the script chooses its own framing. A single is a close-up of whoever is talking; a two-shot is them and one other; wide is everybody.

The standard behind it

• A cast member has a bio, and the script is written as that person — their work, their manner, what they would and would not say — never recited on screen. A name with no bio is just a name, as before.
• A cast member can have a face. Pick a picture from your library for a name in the brand kit and that speaker’s panel is the picture — filling the box, their name on a plate, stepped back in light when somebody else is talking. Anyone without one keeps the drawn card, side by side.
• A portrait is cropped from the top, not the middle. A headshot’s face is in the top third, and a centred crop beheads it.
• The insert framing puts the speaker over their own footage: the picture full frame, their face in the corner above the caption. A footage scene with any other framing is the picture alone, the line carried as voice-over.
• A single draws one panel however large the cast is. Drawing everybody and highlighting one of them is a wide, and calling it a single would be a camera direction nothing followed.
• A two-shot wraps rather than running off the end of the cast, so the last speaker is framed with the first rather than alone.
• Exactly one panel is ever marked as speaking. Two would be a frame that cannot happen.