Basic Training: Composition 101: Part 1

Kyle Cassidy
September 2006

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Ask a lot of people what makes good art, and they'll all have a different opinion from an artist's use of color and paint to the subject matter or design, but one thing they'll all nearly note what separates the amateurs from the masters is composition.

Step right up, boys and girls, class is in session.

Videographers, photographers and painters are all very similar. Besides getting invited to all the best parties, they each need to tell a story within the four walls of a frame. These frames differ in dimension, but the principle remains the same: the screen is the real estate you are using to sell your vision. Use it wisely.

There are movies like The Cell, Snow Falling on Cedars and Sisters that I believe you could pause at random, print that frame, hang it on your wall, and be happy looking at it for the rest of your life. This is a worthy goal.

Composition can vary slightly depending on what type of shot you're using. Close-ups usually fill the frame with a single object, while long shots will often include more objects.

Long shots are often establishing shots that portray characters in their environment. You may, for example, compose a shot showing the Washington Monument in the background and two tiny people sitting on a bench in the foreground. What does this tell us? That they're in Washington -- they may be politicians, or spies. Or, a shot of two tiny people with the vastness of a mountain before them. What does this tell us? That people are small and frail.

One of my favorite long shots in recent history is in the climax of Ryuhei Kitamura's martial arts adventure Azumi: town gates open up to reveal our heroine standing alone in the distance. In between her and the man she is supposed to rescue are several hundred heavily armed pirates. A gasp of anticipation goes through the audience. What do we learn from this shot? We know that Azumi must get from point A to point B through a very dangerous expanse of pirate infested street. How well those three bits of information (heroine, villains and goal) are composed on the screen is the difference between a movie that tells a story, and one that tells a story beautifully.

Medium shots are often used to show interactions between characters -- two people sitting at a table, a person cutting vegetables at a kitchen counter. Medium shots are how people living and working indoors usually see things. The medium shots Steven Spielberg used in the boat sequences of Jaws give the viewer a cramped feeling, reminding us that our heroes have very little sanctuary.

Close-ups reveal facial expressions, and emotion, they take the world away and leave us alone with a character. One very effective use of closeups was in the intro sequences of Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill­--where a woman's hands are shown buttoning a man's shirt, adjusting his tie, straightening his collar. At first the audience is mislead into believing that a man is being dressed for a romantic evening on the town by an attentive partner, only as the opening credits go on, do we realize that the hands are that of a funeral director preparing a corpse...download the full article here.