Shot of a character at a table, image framed on his face. Camera rotates left or right to the next character, who spouts his line. Camera goes left or right again, sometimes to the first guy, who spouts his response. In comedy, the shot may jump to characters who were not known to be in the room or play with the audience's mental image of the scene by switching around the characters off-screen.
Contrast with Orbital Shot. Not to be confused with Roundabout Shot.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Used quickly in One Piece, as the characters debate the octopus.
- Used with a room instead of a table in the Cowboy Bebop episode "Mushroom Samba", when Jet is demanding the others to tell him who ate their rations.
- Used during an interrogation in Hellsing Ultimate.
- Briefly shown in the Tenchi Muyo! In Love movie, although the characters are actually spinning around a fixed point prior to a trip through a time machine.
Films — Animation
- Turning Red: This is done for the scene where the extended Lee family plus Mr. Gao have dinner on the night of the red moon ritual.
Films — Live-Action
- Boogie Nights, in the scene where Dirk, Reed, and Todd plot their visit to Rahad Jackson's house.
- Not at a table, but used at the end of the The A-Team movie while inside a police van.
- G-Saviour: Used when Mark and Jack have a heated argument during the party.
- The film Conspiracy (2001), almost all of which takes place in a single room with a group of Nazi bureaucrats seated at a conference table, does this twice: first when the participants introduce their names and ranks, second when the conference's chairman Reinhard Heydrich asks them all individually for their support for his "solution".
- The Front Page: Has a variation on this in which, instead of the camera spinning around to capture the people at the table, it follows Hildy and Walter as they walk around the table. They circle the table at least twice as Walter puts on the hard sell and gets Hildy to forget about his impending marriage as they get excited about bringing the mayor and the sheriff down.
- Pull My Daisy: An exceedingly slow one of all the people sitting around the table at dinner. This is a visual echo of the opening shot of the film, which is a slow pan around the empty apartment.
- A Generation: Dorota is introducing Stach to the rest of the members of the La Résistance cell. The camera starts with Dorota and Stach greeting the others. Then a member of the audience lights a cigarette and passes it around. As the camera quite slowly pans around, the cigarette is passed from person to person as we see everyone in the cell. The shot doesn't end until it completes a full circle by coming back to Dorota and Stach.
- The Pedestrian (1973): The old ladies who have joined Inge for her tea party are introduced by a slow round table shot in which each old lady in turn spouts a bit of dialogue before the camera comes to the next guest. The joke here is that each old lady is played by a famous actress on stage or screen (one is Dame Peggy Ashcroft).
Live-Action TV
- The scenes with the three binmen/witches in the Macbeth episode of the BBC's Shakespeare Re-Told [sic] were sometimes shot this way.
- There's a shot like this in The L Word episode "Lap Dance", where the camera is placed on a Lazy Susan.
- The opening sequence for Roseanne. It changed every season, but the format was always the same.
- Spaced: "It's times like this I wish we were telepathic, don't you, Tim?"
- Used with great effect in That 70s Show, most often in scenes where it is implied that the characters are smoking pot.
- Used at one point in the opening to Too Many Cooks to demonstrate just how many Cooks there were.
- Featured in the Firefly episode "The Message" as the crew is observing the dead body of Private Tracey. In one outtake, Nathan Fillion starts running behind the camera so that he's sharing the frame with each of the others, culminating in the shot settling on him in the coffin with Tracey's body.
- During the opening Poker game in The Outer Limits (1963) episode "Fun and Games", there's a continuous shot in which the camera moves from one player to the next, providing a closeup of each of them.
Web Videos
- Dream looks at all the hunters surrounding him in the very beginning of the Minecraft Manhunt grand finale
before running away.
Western Animation
- The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: In the episode "The Evil Beneath", the camera pans from Jimmy, Carl and Sheen as they talk at a dinner table; when the camera freezes on Jimmy after he's done speaking, he looks at the camera and jerks a thumb at Sheen's direction and the camera then switches to focusing on Sheen.
- Justice League: Twice to emphasize their motivations.
- The first sequence shows the first time we see the people involved in Project CADMUS, as it pans around to show each of their faces, and they're all faces we have seen.
- The second has a sequence with two simultaneous Round Table Shots: one of the League, and the other of CADMUS. It goes back and forth between the two scenes while they all recite much the same dialogue about the same situation.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Party Pooped", during the Mane Six's meeting in the Castle of Friendship after failing to impress the yaks, the camera pans from one respective mare to the next as they discuss their thoughts.
