Video communication and ‘camera actions’: The production of wide video shots in courtrooms with remote defendants

• Camera shot are produced as meaningful actions in videoconference settings.
• They are sensitive to the sequential environment of courtroom interaction.
• Wide shots visually highlight collective forms of speakership or recipiency.
• Such camera motions make visible a particular member's interactional competence.
• Members can routinely recognize subtle changes in participation frames on the fly.

We consider here the use of videoconference for remote testimonies in the courtroom. Based on video recordings of actual hearings with remote participants, we analyze the systematic organization of camera motions in this setting, and show how they constitute interactional moves in their own right, i.e. ‘camera actions’, characteristic of ‘video communication contextures’. We focus on the production of wide shot, as a situated and timed camera-mediated accomplishment in the course of the hearing, and show: (a) how such an accomplishment is sensitive to its sequential environment; (b) how it is accountable as a way to mark the particular relevance of a group of participants with respect to the ongoing talk, and therefore oriented-to as a resource to visually highlight collective forms of speakership or recipiency; (c) how such camera motions are sequentially relevant and sequentially implicative with respect to the ongoing video interaction; (d) how such camera motion, and more generally the video communication ecologies which enable them make visible a particular member's interactional competence, that of being able to recognize the relevance of subtle changes in participation frames, routinely, unreflexively and on the fly.