Round Table Shot

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.

Examples of Round Table Shot include:

Anime & Manga

• Used quickly in One Piece, as the characters debate the octopus.
• Used with a room instead of a table in the Mushroom Samba episode of Cowboy Bebop, 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.

Film

• Boogie Nights, in the scene where Dirk, Reed, and Todd plot their visit to Rahad Jackson's house.
• Seen once, quickly, in Serenity, the movie sequel to Firefly.
• Not at a table, but used at the end of the A-Team movie while inside a police van.

Live Action TV

• The scenes with the three binmen/witches in the Macbeth episode of the BBC's Shakespea 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.

Western Animation

• An episode of Justice League has a sequence with two simultaneous Round Table Shots: one of the League, and the other of their villains. It goes back and forth between the two scenes.