Since I've been making so many 3D environments, I've started to notice that it's crucial for portfolio and for players to have a cinematic that displays the environment. Granted, I've been doing this in the past, yet I haven't gotten into a full study of it. I've been looking through examples in games, where you enter new areas or vistas and a short cinematic shows the part of the world you just entered. Castlevania Lords of Shadow does this quite a lot.
Sadly, the best reference I could find was this developer's commentary on how they built the environments, and though most of the ingame footage is just a camera pan around the player, there's a few camera panning shots of what I was talking about before that are establishing shots for the world.
Movie reference also develops a good grounded basis to create work on, as movies are all camera operation. Here's the opening to the movie Hugo:
