I left my thimbles and Socialist reading material at home.

I decided to use the movie Stranger Than Fiction as my example - in particular this scene below where Harold meets Miss Pascal in the bus and attempts to engage in small talk (I didn't choose it because the cinematography in this specific scene was so wonderful, but mostly because it was easy to find on YouTube and is a clear-cut example of this concept).

The Long Shot in this scene is at the very beginning where Harold (Will Ferrell) is not shown, and the camera only shows the people standing in the bus. This is done in order to go from General to Specific. If the camera only concentrated on Harold at first, the audience would be confused as to where he was.  In class, Prof. Ramirez-Berg also talked about how the long shot usually indicates loneliness - and in a way, I can see how that is in this movie since Harold does almost everything alone (at least in the beginning).  However, this this particular scene I feel like the long shot was done just to get the audience to get the general idea of the location.

The next shot is the Medium Shot where Harold is "deep in thought" thinking about all the calculations and precisions in the world.  The camera does a kind of lazy shift (not sure what you call it) to resemble the motion of the bus, but it mostly continues to stay in the medium-shot mode the rest of the scene. This shot allows the audience to see that Harold is truly alone - there aren't even people sitting directly next to him.  Also, once Miss Pascal steps on the bus, it reveals the relationship between the two. Since Harold previously "o-ogled" her, she keeps a very far distance (especially evident in the shot where her purse is in the foreground and Harold is seen as very far away), until of course she falls into the seat closer to him. Also, in this scene where Harold is alone initially, the camera is slightly at a high-angle, as it is in a lot of the movie since we, the audience, have the power: we know what will happen to Harold since the narrator who is controlling his life is telling us. Thus, Harold is essentially powerless when faced with destiny and surreal forces acting upon him. However, there are many instances where he is at eye-level, allowing us to identify him in a more human-like way rather than simply a character in this story within a story.

Directly after the camera goes into Medium Shot when Harold is alone, it zooms in on his man-purse/briefcase onto his pen and paper - showing the irony of Harold calculating the precisions of his daily life while his life slowly starts to stray away from his routine, and all the mathematics of it melts away.  Soon after, Miss Pascal coincidentally steps into the bus, already revealing a shift in the story.