Before reading composition guidelines you should read all of the Elements and Principles sections. Using the composition guidelines can help you use the elements and principles of visual art to make compositions that please the eye and tell your story as clearly as possible.
Why does good composition help communicate? We don't want to distract our audience with the ugliness of a poorly constructed and confusing composition. Your composition needs to help you tell your story and help give your film continuity, the equivalent to unity. Composition can be used to connect shots for a more seamless appearance. Using the guidelines can help to accentuate the center of interest and connect shots seamlessly through compositional matching and vectors.
Most high school films are shot on real life locations rather than on stages. This may be inexpensive, but it gives you a different set of environmental problems. Instead of having to build sets or shoot in front of a green screen, you will need to carefully observe what you are seeing in the frame. By shooting on location, you have little or no control over the setting. Cars can go back and forth in your background, people might wander in to your frame, or the wind might blow a Burger King wrapper across the ground in front of you. It is all too easy to become absorbed in the fine acting skills of your talent and completely ignore how they relate to the total frame. Your talent is the center of interest of your composition and you need to constantly be aware of that. They need to integrate well with the background and above all, the background, foreground and all other visual objects within the frame need to contribute to overall continuity.
Real life is messy...like your room. Even the most well kept house has an abundance of visual clutter. You may have spent five minutes picking up a few things before your shoot, but the camera sees everything and flattens it all into two dimensions. Cameras cannot pick and choose like your eye. If you are shooting in doors you need to think like a set designer. Your entire environment needs to be carefully composed to accentuate your film story. To begin, find some boxes and junk away, take down crooked posters, and pick up the socks dangling on the chair. You can pile it all in a corner behind your camera and scatter it after the shoot. You may need to get the vacuum cleaner and dust rag and give the area a thorough cleaning. In the studio you can bring in exactly what filmic objects you need - but - on location, everything in front of the lens becomes a filmic object. You should only have what you need and nothing more. If you are totally depraved and use your computer's camera you still need to attend to the background.
Try getting close to the action, that way you limit the amount of background that will be in your frame. With better cameras you can also reduce depth of field which results in a blurred background.
Good story boards can help with composition. When you draw the boards, and if you know the guidelines, you can better see how the composition flows from shot to shot. When you are later shooting on location, you can use your boards to arrange your talent and other filmic objects so that they are composed well. Shooting a video for composition is all the more difficult because you have added the elements of time and motion. You have to plan where the shot begins and where the shot ends. You are composing in four dimensions.
It is good to know the guidelines however you do not have to follow them exactly. Many excellent compositions are made by artists who cannot even name the guidelines. The guidelines are inductive, that is, observations were made about art and the rules followed. Often they happen accidentally and often, when they are followed slavishly, your composition can look contrived and hackneyed. You may want a static look that is gained by using a centered composition. You may want to divide your picture plane it half by placing two characters equal distance from the center y axis. Comedy Central's animated show, "South Park" will place its characters in a straight line along the x axis and other filmmakers have done the same. It is unlikely that you or anybody else reading this page is an untrained, artistic genius whose natural talent transcends any necessity of study, so, knowing the guidelines can only improve your work and you will know when you break the rule.
The human eye is naturally drawn to a horizon line that is two thirds above the base of the image. Whether it is repelled by a centered horizon line is a question yet to be answered, however a centered horizon line tends to divided your picture plane into two separate planes and disunites your composition.
If you go to an art museum and look at paintings, you might notice that the composition is more often divided into three somewhat equal horizontal and vertical bands. The center of interest is usually placed at one of the intersection points. Notice how the 19th Century French Painter Ingre (pronounced ang) used the rule of thirds in his painting, "The Valpinçon Bather". Although not a strict application, he places the center of the figure directly along the intersection of the two of the thirds and the center of the body is placed at a major intersection point. Although the figure might appear to be sitting in the center, a closer observation shows that she sits to the right side. Notice where the base of the mattress, covered with the sheet, rests and how the curtain occupies the left third of the composition.
Before you shoot, pay attention to where you want your horizon line and avoid centering. The image below was taken from a student video, although the main action is centered, the rule of thirds still apply. The horizon is well placed at the bottom third of the frame and the subordinate filmic objects are placed in the left and right thirds.
When we think of line in art work, we think of narrow dark marks that form the outlines of shape, however, in photography and videography there are no actual lines, we only have the edges of shapes that are derived from changes in color value. You could say that there is only value and color in photography, however the human mind is adept at creating meaning from an otherwise chaotic environment of light and shadow. Cameras record and humans see.
Since there are no actual lines in photography, unless of course you photograph one you have drawn, all lines are implied. That means they are not real, but we make them real with our imaginations. There are two types of imaginary lines. The first is the obvious boundary that separates the shapes, the second is a vector, which is the continuation of any existing line or point through the film space.
We can take our Ingre painting and further enjoy analyzing it by finding lines and vectors in a work that uses no line.
Good photographs take the eye on a journey through the photo by creating paths for the eye to follow. Good videos connect shots in a similar way. Edge lines and vectors lead the eye through the visual narrative, holding it together and introducing the subsequent (next) shot. The invisible lines can connect your shots and likewise they can break the space and break continuity.
Basic shapes, such as the circle, square and triangle, can also be used with pleasing results. Notice the many triangles that are hidden within the Ingre painting.
The frame below comes from Akira Kurosawa's classic "Seven Samurai." He has composed the scene using strong diagonal lines. Notice that both the workers and the embankments form lines that complement each other.
Too much visual activity can confuse the audience. You want to control what they should see and you don't want your audience to see what you want them to see. A test would be to count how many objects you can see in an image given a time limit of one second. You can easily see one, two, three, and maybe seven or eight. Too many objects will begin to group into a greater whole and make a new object such as a crowd. You are also looking at an illusion created by the shapes formed by light and dark. The more shadows and highlights the more difficult it is to quickly see. Your audience does not have time to study the shot since if edited properly, it may only last 3 to 5 seconds.
You want to accentuate you center of interest by simplifying your background setting. Remember, the background is not something that floats in the distance, it intersects and blends with the center of interest.
Below is a location setting that works reasonably well. There is nothing distracting and the lines lead to the center of interest. Clutter is non existent and if they wanted some clutter to advance their idea, then some could be added and strategically placed. The blue trash can in the distance may or may not be a problem but it could be easily moved. The diagonal lines also deepen the sense of space and could be used to direct the eye to the following scene.
The shot below is much to confused, random, and chaotic to be used in any video production. How many students are in the shot? Is it possible to count them in five seconds? A crowd should look like a crowd. Professional crowd scenes are carefully arranged to communicate the idea and advance the story. You can make a good crowd scene by enlisted ten or so friends that will cooperate and follow instructions. Have them stand close together so that they fill the entire frame. Also, in the student film, "Stones of Rokute" the student digital artist cleverly copied warriors and layered them back into the frame using the masking process.
Compare the above with the following shot from Ferris Bueller. Notice that our center of interest, the kneeling student, is not covered by any of the other characters. Also, no characters completely covers the other. The characters were carefully blocked (placed) on their mark and knew exactly where to move. They had a beginning and ending point which they strictly followed. Remember, real life is messy.
The following shot is a good example of simplicity. The desk is used as a simple background to advance the idea of complete and utter boredom. Is the rule of thirds applied? How? Perhaps the joke could be advanced further by having the drool soak into his notes, however, given the short time of the shot, about two seconds, any additional filmic objects would distract the audience. All we need to see is sleeping student and pool of drool.
Below notice how carefully positioned are the filmic objects. The set designer took time before the shot placing objects in correct positions according to the set design. If any object were moved, it would cause a distracting jump cut and break continuity. In the foreground notice the three bottles of correction fluid all perfectly spaced. In the background three certificates hang on the wall complementing the three bottles and begging the question, perhaps the certificates also need correcting. This is not what you would see in a real life school secretary's office. Take everything off the desk and you would probably find outlines of where objects are to be positioned in case they are disturbed. If take two, three and four don't work, the crew goes to lunch, they come back to shoot take five and a bottle is moved, then continuity is broken.
By reducing clutter the setting is visually simplified. We see only what we need to see.
"Put a frame around anything and it becomes art," can be heard in the halls of many art schools. There may be some truth to this statement. When we frame an object, when we place a decorative wood or metal rectangle around a picture or object, we set it apart from everything else around it. The frame gives an image a enclosure which calls attention to it. In film we call each individual exposure are frame because it a fixed, rectangular boundary.
Within a composition we can also use shapes to enclose other shapes. A doorway, window, hallway or any rectangular shape that surrounds the center of interest also frames the center of interest.
In the image below from Ferris Bueller, notice how his mother head is framed in the rectangles behind her. Perhaps the cross shape is there to make her appear more pious. They do think of those things.
Orson Welles directed and starred in the classic film "Citizen Kane" based on the life of William Randolph Hearst. In the scene below, the character Susan is framed in the mirror and by surrounding objects which tell us about her life. (if you are a Kane fan and have only watched the film a few times, there is an object in this shot you will surely recognize!)
Below another more obvious example of framing using the doorway and the mirror.
Although the composition below is reasonably sufficient to tell the story, it has one major problem. One of the characters in the background of a multi level action shot is partially hidden behind our main character. We need to see all the characters and their interactions. This intersection of filmic objects is called "merging." It is a mistake that could easily be corrected if the videographer took a little more time to review the position of characters within the frame. You rarely see this in professionally made films. Too much money is involved and talent should be revealed and not covered.
Directors and Cinematographers work together to avoid any awkward mergings that hide the faces of the actors.
Below see how Kurosawa carefully positions his characters. No character covers the face any other character, even is tight crowd scenes. Seated is Toshiro Mifune who plays Kikuchiyo the buffoon samurai. He is carefully positioned in the frame so he does not cover the many background players.
There are many other excellent web sites that share ideas about composition theory.