The SECRET to CINEMATIC Composition

have you guys ever noticed that while you're watching a movie how your eyes are automatically drawn to a particular part of the frame that's because everything from the subjects their surroundings and even where the camera is placed is all part of something called composition and today we're going to break down how some of the best cinematographers use the art of Framing and composition to tell a story first in order to understand how to compose beautiful shots and what they mean we need to establish what composition is and basically what composition is in film is the

arrangement of elements in a frame this can mean people objects Landscapes and even light and Shadow and the way you compose your shot can really deliver a feeling to your audience now a very symmetrical shot can give the feeling Balan while having a frame completely unbalanced can symbolize chaos you can even showcase power dynamics between characters just by placing them in particular points of the frame which brings us to our next topic and that is points of interest every filmmaker will compose a shot with a point of interest in mind and if we break that

down to its simplest State there are two elements to think about when you're composing your shot the subject or the point of interest and the background and there are many ways to bring your audience's eyes to the point of interest in your frame now the first one that we're going to talk about is obvious this is focus Point more often than not the subject where you want your audience to look is going to be in Focus while the foreground or the background is out of focus and racking Focus from one subject to another will automatically

tell us where to pay attention in your frame another way to do this is by using symmetry to draw your audience's eyes to a particular point in the frame and that's because there's these leading Lin lines pointing us right towards the point of interest in this scene from tenant the main character is between these railroad tracks creating these lines leading you right to our main character now it's kind of obvious in this particular frame because you have him sitting right in the middle of the frame but if we take a look at this scene from

Ad Astra our character is not in the center of the frame however there are still leading lines that brings you to this point of interest and if you pay close attention you could start to realize that they do this a lot in films where they have all of these lines leading you to that point of Interest another way that you guys can think about composing your shots is by using something called the rule of thirds chances are if you've been into cinematography or even photography for a little while you've definitely heard this before and even

though this is a very basic concept it's extremely helpful when it comes to composing your shots or at least giving you a starting point on how to begin composing your shot now in order to use the rule of thirds you have to place your subject at one of the four intersecting points on the vertical and the Horizon points in your frame and if you guys really pay attention you could start to see this time and time again across many different films and many different genres now of course you don't have to follow this rule of

thirds all the time but having this in the back of your mind while you're trying to compose your shots is definitely going to be helpful especially when you're starting from scratch and you kind of have a blank slate to work with it could be a little bit overwhelming at least having an idea of splitting the screen or your frame into three equal parts and understanding where each person or each object should go in that frame is definitely going to allow you to have some sort of balance in your composition another great tool to help you

guys compose your shots is the use of shape shapes and what shapes do is they allow us to make sense of a frame it's almost like we find this familiarity in these different shapes that we're comfortable seeing the use of squares triangles and circles are such an easy way to build a clean frame and a big reason why they have the ability to do this is because they create frames within frames allowing your viewer to have a narrow point of interest within your scene and this Frame within a frame could have such a big impact

on your scene a small frame can give you an uncomfortable kind of claustrophobic feeling while a larger frame could allow us to feel a little bit more comfortable and satisfied and the amount of space that that frame takes up plays a huge role in telling your audience how they should feel about that frame and speaking of space another huge factor in framing cinematic compositions is depth and space in your shot when we sit down and we watch a film we're watching it in two Dimensions so one extremely important factor to composing cinematic images is to

create this illusion of depth in your scene and the way I like to think about this is building your composition in layers having something in the foreground something somewhere in in the middle and then thinking about where you're going to place your background and where the focus points are and vice versa if you're focusing on something in the background having something really out of focus even if it's just a small little piece of the frame in the foreground will allow you to give your viewer this sense of depth and of course giving you that cinematic

look so the next time you're composing your scene try placing your character in one layer and have multiple layers behind them whether that be other characters objects or even landscape that can allow your audience to have some sort of perception of depth in your film Now by having your subject in an establishing shot where you're showcasing the vast landscape around them you can start to make your subject feel insignificant or small and of course vice versa by having your subject really close and tight to the frame you start to make your subject feel big and

powerful and if we stop and we think about that for a second this could be a great way to Showcase power dynamics between characters by placing a character closer to the camera giving them more space in your frame versus another character who's taking up less space on the frame could actually make the character closer to the camera feel more powerful and big or as if they're sort of in control of the situation then you have something called Head room and Lead room headro being the amount of space above your character's head and Lead room being

the amount of space in front or behind your character giving your character a lot of space or head room can give a sense of calmness in your frame while giving them less head room and having a tighter frame on their face could make it feel a little bit more claustrophobic a little bit more intense or dramatic and when it comes to lead room typically characters will have more space in front of them than behind them by giving them more space behind them you draw the audience's attention to that negative space which could be a great

storytelling tool if you want to introduce a character walking in from behind them and if you guys are looking for inspiration for your next film Project then you got to check out a company called film Vibes film Vibes is a database of over 1 million clips from films music videos and commercials and the whole reason behind this company is to be able to help filmmakers Source assets for their treatments pitch decks and story boards now what me and my partner have found which we didn't expect was how inspirational could be for any and all filmmaker

because we have over a million assets to choose from and you could actually see camera movements color palettes and if you guys are interested in signing up I'll leave a link down below 20% discount code to anybody who signs up and uh yeah man even if you don't want to sign up and you just want to browse for free and you want to check out all the different inspirational videos and and films that we have on there um you could actually search all of that stuff for free and actually use PNG to grab Stills for

free so I definitely urge you guys to go and check that out now when it comes to composing shots one of the main things that you have to answer is where to put your subject in relation to the frame the background and the other characters and when we really break it down there's only four different composition types you have Center frame where we have the subject right dead in the middle of the center of the frame then you have left heavy where you have the subject of course in the left of the frame and then

you have right heavy which of course you guys guessed it you have your subject in the right of the frame and then you have something called short side framing where you place subject close to the side of the frame where they're looking without giving them that extra looking space all of these techniques can help guide you guys to frame your scenes but I think the most important factor by far is your script and just like with anything else that I've talked about on this channel I'm a firm believer in you know in order to tell

a good visual story it starts with the script it starts by looking at the script taking a look at you know what each scene is meant to feel like who are the characters and what is the relationship to them and the visual story that you're trying to to tell and when you do that and you really pay attention to that you'll start to understand like how you need to compose your shots and the relationship between you know each character or the environment that they're in you should try to ask yourself is there a particular power

dynamic between characters are you trying to give importance to a certain object in a scene how small or how big do you want a character to feel it's so important as a director filmmaker or even a cinematographer to go through your script and start making these decisions and be very methodical about how you want to compose your frame the better you understand what each scene is trying to say the more sense of the frame and the composition you'll be able to make and if you guys want to learn more about cinematography and just film making

in general me and my team are putting together a course that we hope to have out by the end of this year so if you guys are interested I'll leave a link right up here you guys can check that out and uh yeah man I want to thank you guys so much for stopping in and hanging out my name is Alex zarfati and I'll see you guys next week deuces