Composing Shots: Spatial Conncetions

Position in the Frame

Panavision Format

Super Wide-screen: Room for experimentation and relating figure to background

Eccentric framing

Good composition is often about withholding and revealing slowly.

Consider starting scenes with details, then widening.

Imagine your first wide-shot, then think of how you can break it up into 3 or 4 shots spread out in time.

Balancing the Composition

180 degree rule

180 degree rule

180 degree rule

“Triangle System”: All shots can be made from one of the three points of the triangle.

In the Triangle set-up, any shot can be joined to any other shot.

Five Basic Set-ups within the Triangle:

1. Angular singles [medium shots or close-ups]

2. Master two-shot

3. Over-the-shoulder shots

4. Point-of-view singles [mediums or close-ups]

5. Profile shots

Pivot Shot: Establishes a new “line of action” [here a new character enters]

180 degrees

Or a character crosses his own line, creating a new line of action with a new sight line

Here the camera is on the “other side” of the Line

Showing how you can choose one side of the Line or the other

Camera can cross the Line so long as the move is uninterrupted.

The Old Clock Shot

• Another way to change the line is through a cut-away [also known as an insert shot] that is related with the scene logically. When we return to the action, the camera can have created a new Line of Action. Cut cutaway serves the same purpose a the bridge shot.

In action sequences there is frequently no line of sight to establish the line of action. In this case, the line of action follows the dominant motion of the subject of the shot. It’s an “implied sight line.”

Crossing the Line can produce real confusion. Here the only way we can identify the cars is by their color. The screen direction is confusing.

Breaking the Rules: Ok when there is unambiguous content in the scene.

The audience knows who this character is and where he is in space.