In this lesson, I want to talk about composition.
Composition is how what we see in our image is framed.
When I’m composing a shot, I’m thinking most importantly, about the story I’m trying to tell. So for example, with this shot.. (4 walls room shot), the story I’m trying to tell is about these 4 walls in my studio, so a shot where we can see a footpoint of the studio would make a lot of sense to the story.
Likewise here, half of the frame is floor. Because we want the viewer to feel like they’re on the floor with me. I’m face down, I’m looking at the floor. You know if I was lying on my back, a better way to frame this might be, with the camera tilted upwards, so the viewer feels like they’re looking into the ceiling with me, the subject.
I also tend to think about how the shot breaks up, and what this means for our eye line. For example, with this shot, if we look at the key lines of travel in this shot, it’s all over the place, our brain is going, “where am i supposed to look”, it just isn’t comfortable.
Whereas if we just adjust this to be more like this.. The lines of travel are heading towards me as the subject, it’s so much easier on the eye for those reasons.
That’s not to say that this one is 100% of the time better. It might be that you’re trying to convey a sense of chaos in your STORY, and actually this composition does a better job of that.
Personally I don’t follow any “thirds” rules, or anything that they traditionally teach you in film school. Like when I was in uni, they’d actually say, the eyeline should be here, and the subject's head should be here. Then I’d see all this stuff that was shot in this really cool way that I’d never seen before, and I’d be like “wait, but you just said!”.
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Shot composition is just another thing that’s helping you tell your story. So really try your best, whenever you’re setting up a shot, to think about why you’re composing a shot a certain way.
And that could be as simple as thinking, right I want a wide shot to begin with to set the scene, so the viewer knows, we’re in Sam's studio. And that’s not always the case, I might start a video close up on my face, with a white background because I don’t want the viewer to be thinking about anything else, but what I’m saying.
A good example of this was when in this video I made, I was filming these scratches on my floor. The only thing I wanted the viewer to take from this was the scratches. I would typically have framed this so that there was a nice background too, but that would have distracted the viewer. The scratches were the only thing that mattered in these shots, so I composed the shot that way.
Remember folks, we learn by doing, I know it might seem like a lot, on top of everything else, but if you get your camera out, the more you practice, the more second nature it will become.
