Thank you for many interesting thoughts!

Indeed, sometimes the question “What is a shot?” can be tricky. The most recent example is Birdman, which pretends to be a one-shot movie but in fact isn’t. All the cuts are carefully hidden. Also, some film contain occasional split-screen scenes, when two shots are shown in parallel. (There is a nice example of this in 500 Days of Summer.) However, these seem to be rare.

I liked a lot your question about the difference between moving head/static landscape vs. static head/moving landscape. The latter doesn’t seem to allow too much movement though, unlike the former. So, the moving-head strategy might be more effective in making viewers entertained. But this is just me thinking out loud, of course.

As for the sci-fi procedural: temporal shifts, such as skipping the beginning, and then presenting it at the end, is an easy but super-powerful tool of making a film more interesting. My friends and I have published a piece on this here https://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet14.pdf (You were asking for more, so here it is.)