Monday Film Class 11/11: Composition

Last Monday we broke into to two groups. Elena and her group filmed a short commercial. My group started by viewing a portion of an epsiode of the show Hot Set, wrapping up our discussion of production design from last week. We then discussed composition and did some activities based on this.

In this case, the 'composition' we are talking about is visual composition, not musical (or any other kind) of composition. Composition is the art of drawing the viewer's eye to certain places and also creating a pleasing or dynamic image. Even when looking at a still image, our eyes tend to rove around. However, we are most comfortable when the composition directs our attention to a few specific areas of focus. Otherwise the image can be cluttered or overwhelming.

An example of an image with little to direct your eye.

Directing films is largely a matter of directing the audience's attention, and so composition is one of the most important tools in cinematic storytelling. Framing and composition are an aspect of cinematography, and often is one of the closest areas of collaboration between the cinematographer and the director.

The demonstrate how viewer's eyes tend to focus in certain areas, I showed this video:

You can also view it here. It depicts the results of some researchers who tracked the eye movements of eleven people watching a scene from There Will Be Blood (2008). The spot each person looks at is reprsented by a green circle which grows larger the longer their gaze remains fixed.

 

Watching the video, it becomes clear that people's gaze is constantly shifting, but also that their gaze tends to be drawn to certain areas. (For a much, much, much more in-depth analysis of this video, see here.) 

For an activity, I showed a number of slides of paintings and movie stills with strong composition. I then asked the students to use a laser pointer to show the class where their eye first went and what other main areas of focus the image had. We found that we all tended to look at the same spots.

We then discussed some of the tricks and rules-of-thumb for creating composition that draw the eye to certain areas. I'll mention them in a separate post. Another great resource for this can be found here.

We then used a camera and practiced taking photos with interesting compositions that followed the rules we discussed. These are the one I felt turned out the best:

 

These four pictures all make use of multiple techniques for creating dynamic composition, including the use of strong lines, placing figures according to the rule of thirds, the rule of odds, good use of negative space, and interesting camera placement. To learn more about each of those elements, you can follow the links, or stay tuned for my next post which will go into more detail about composition.