Composition 101: Why composition matters in cinematic language？

Human beings are prone to find order where there may be none. Deciding the placement of the subject through the viewfinder of a camera is not merely a technical decision, it is an expressive one. Roger Deakins once said, “I think people confuse pretty with good cinematography. What was it Freddie Francis says, ‘There was good cinematography and bad cinematography, and then there’s the right cinematography for the movie.’ I often feel if viewers don’t mention your work, it’s probably better than if they do.”

What is composition?

So what is film composition overall? We can rephrase this sentence by ‘How do filmmakers present space in film?’ Or ‘How do we tell a story in one single image?’. For many artists, photographers, and filmmakers, this is the ultimate question.

The rough but simple answer is the arrangement of an image, which includes framing, focus, scale, guiding lines, eyeliner of subjects, subject close to the light, geometry, diagonals, staging, depth, balance, etc. Out of all of the disciplines that coincide under this umbrella of cinematography.

Granted, telling a story is not a pre-requisite for an image — a simple landscape can be just as evocative and resonant as anything, but even then there is still a story to be found.

While there are no absolute rules for composition, there are various principles that artists utilize to create compositions that convey what they desire. In many ways, you already understand these principles on a gut level.

In a nutshell, with whatever canvas they want to work with most, composition is simply how the elements inside the frame are positioned and exhibited to the viewer, it is a skill of knowing what toshow, what not to show, as well as how to show it and how not to show it. By intentionally directing the structure within a frame, filmmakers enhance the meaning of whatever it is they want to say.

The visual necessity of composition

Case in point as to why composition is a necessary technical skill when constructing any image. Without it, films would be a sensory design overload information without structure. But with it, we gain focus. However as an art it should not approached exclusively with pragmatism, because it is not just where we place our subjects of interest, but why.

What can we say with composition?A millennial of visual artistshave realized successful compositional templates that used to this day. They have tried and tested formulas to make an image pleasing to the eyes, yet, when the rules that define an area of study are practically ingrained withinour minds, it can be very difficult to demonstrate versatility. Be that as it may, compositional variety is not the focus here, but what do these compositions say, and what can you see when you go against this formula. That is what we want to find out.

Golden ratio

Rule of thirds

Triangular composition

The birth of cinematic composition

If the Kuleshov Effect and Sergei Eisenstein helped us discover that editing was the tool to create meaning to across multiple pieces of film, then composition was how we could tell our stories with one single shot.

The visual arts exist far beyond film and have endured a much more extensive lifespan. In the grand scheme of things cinema is stilla relatively new art form. Cinema took influence during its infancy from the existing mediums in order to understand its role in the artistic landscape. Many early directors and filmmakers either directly hired from theatre or at the very least were influenced by the form, yet the impact this had on composition could not be ignored.

Because of how different film was. Composition did not even occur to many filmmakers, instead, techniques were imported directly from theatre. Often all of the actors would face towards the camera as they in auditorium. Because of the projection was presented in two dimensions, the imagines of themselves were also presented as such typically never harnessing the depth of filed. Framing was not standard practice and thus composition of early cinema was almost identical for every shot. As a matter of fact, many films were just one shot.

However, once filmmakers realized that camera did not need to be locked down in one spot, once the technology was propelling the art form improved, the imagination of filmmakers began to flourish, where composition was once a last minute imitation of conventional setups of other mediums.

Now it was being championed such as Fritz Lang and German expressionists who became pioneers of using composition. The tonal leverage - wide angles became keynotes for epics, whereas canted angles and crookedshapes were synonymous with horror, camera movement became less restrictive and could capture emotions like never before.

German Expressionism Part Ⅰ: Fritz Lang And ‘Mise-en-Scène’

Artist like Carl Dreyer found that a close-up could capture the subtle nuances of an actor’s performance via new found methods of composing shots, the emotional prospectsof film had changed forever. Composition became a technique that could infuse both meaning as well as visual splendors.

Compositional influencers: create deeper meaning as for storytelling

To attract the audience’s attention. At its most rudimentary core, composition exists as a tool to accentuate the focal elements of an image: what should the viewer be looking at and how do we get them to look at it. Every image

requires systems to guide the eye line of the audience .

Their primary purpose is to use visual devices to highlight key subjects. Why use them solely to control sights when they can also create very interesting subtext.

A good example is the frame within a frame which if you look out for, you would be surprised at how often they are used. Frames in cinema work to help the elements appear in a much more uniformed manner, they tend to dilute the external details of an imagine, our eyes are drawn to them because within the frame lies order and hopefully our main subject.

Via this techniques, emerges deeper implications, these frames are often used as a partition to separate, for subtext, why not use this separation to symbolize the different worlds beyond both sides of the frame. It can show a contrast as simple as freedom versus isolation. The most interesting use of frame composition arises when viewers do not think exclusively asa frame , such as the use of doorways and windows, but things really thought provoking when you think of how anything can be created into a border for your subject, then it becomes an instance of showing whether your subject is in an open frame or a closed frame border is constantly closed by the people around him .

Composition is not just about aesthetic quality but creating meaning. Any compositional influencer can be used in such a way.

Lines of perspective, we tend to follow lines in reality as well as in an image, especially if they all share the same point of convergence, which in compositional terms would typically be your subjective focus.

Lines are simply optional fun creating a one-point perspective, simply showing the mise-en-scene leading towards a character is an alternative, it can also show them battling against the odds. Use lines to pin your character in a corner showing them trapped under the circumstance we find them in . There are necessary traits of composing images in order to create a sufficient picture.

All of these methods are just different takes of how filmmakers can say “look at this!” All of them achieved through good composition, but that does not mean that they can not be implemented for added depth. Attracting viewer attention is the core tenant of composition, though if you manage to attract their vision as well as convey a message through the visual elements, then you have done your job very well.

To gain the most out of a film’s composition, it requires what to be a crucial approach to the craft. To fulfill the main objective of composition, what subject has control of the scene must be shown .

As though what composition is best at is displaying the power dynamics within an image, the positioning of objects seems to be the greatest way to translate visually, the degree of control that characters hold in a scene .