Five rules
Do you ever feel like your videos are missing something, even though you've spent countless hours in the edit? You've got the grade absolutely dialed in, and you've shot it on the best camera that your money can buy. Well, rewind the tape, my friend—we've got to go back to basics. We're going to look at shot composition.
The composition of your image has everything to do with the angle, the shot size, who's in your frame, where they are in your frame, and even sometimes why they're in your frame.
"Good shot composition creates intrigue, drama, and visual interest, and it can help you tell your story while guiding the audience down the path that you're laying for them."
So let's take a look at some of the rules and a few bits of best practice when it comes to composing your shots. We'll do it with the help of filmmaker and photographer Hayden Dib, who will show you how to put it all into action.
Now, what is shot composition? The main rules and techniques that we'll cover in this course are:
- The rule of thirds
- Balance
- The 180-degree rule
- Leading lines
- Frames within a frame
There's plenty to talk about within these categories, and I'll also show you some shot composition examples from the real world.
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The rule of thirds
We'll kick things off with a shot composition technique I'm sure many of you have heard of before, and that is the rule of thirds. It's really straightforward, and you can use it on every frame you compose from this moment on.
The principle is that you split your frame into thirds, both horizontally and vertically, which gives you four points in your frame where the lines intersect. Frame up your point of interest on any one of those intersections, and you've got a shot that's composed using the rule of thirds.
We'll talk more about how you can use the thirds of your frame when we look at balance, but for now, let's look at the rule of thirds in action.
You'll often see that two-thirds of the shot have not a lot going on, and all the points of interest within the shot are localized around the intersecting points. The cinematographer is doing everything they can in this instance to draw your eye to the action.
Other times, you'll see that the scene is rather cluttered and messy, and by framing on the thirds, they're showing us what to focus on and what to ignore.
This is a very quick, very simple technique to employ on your shots, and it's generally understood by any seasoned viewer, even at a subconscious level. If they don't even know what the rule of thirds is, they'll know somewhere in the back of their brain that this is a desirable way of composing a shot, and you'll be able to draw their eye to the part of the image that you want them to be focusing on.
Balance
It's important to create a balanced composition. That doesn't always mean that you need to move something into frame—it might actually mean moving the camera. So let's join Hayden on the streets of Melbourne and see how you can explore your location and create balance in your shot composition.
For example, if I'm shooting a scene with this brick wall as the background, I could shoot it straight on (left), but I can get a more interesting composition just by taking a few steps towards the corner and using an alleyway to balance out the frame (right).
"Perspective is everything. Move closer, move further back, and you'll see things differently."
Now, if you're shooting an interview, you may be working in live locations such as restaurants and cafés that are open to the public, where you can't control the location. It's good to be quick on your feet when a location isn't ideal.
For this interview, we had to keep a small footprint within this building, so we had the interviewee standing in a hallway. Now, this particular interview is going to be intercut with another interview I'd captured earlier in the day. In the first interview, I had the subject framed off to the left, looking across the camera to the right. I wanted to do the opposite for this interview so that it would feel balanced in the edit.
In terms of the location, this converted warehouse space had a range of colors and textures, and importantly, leading lines. I'm looking at all of this when I position my subject in the frame. You just don't want anything to feel crowded in one spot or too empty in another. We'll cover the concept of leading lines in detail later in this course, but you can see from this shot composition example that the raised walkway to the left leads down the frame, drawing our eye to his face, which is a focal point.
It might be a quick and simple interview setup, but by following a few of these key shot composition rules, you can come up with a pretty interesting and well-balanced image in any location.
That is, of course, looking at a very standard way of balancing your frame in a setting that really calls for some standard framing, a master interview. And in film and TV, you can often see some creative and visually interesting shot compositions.
As the saying goes, you've got to know the rules to break the rules.
Now, one more thing about balance before we move on. Typically, when you describe anything as being balanced in other fields, you'd think about equal weighting on either side, i.e. symmetry. But when it comes to the visual image, that isn't always the case.
Symmetry is quite rare in real life. Faces might seem symmetrical, but they're not. Locations, unless deliberately designed that way, aren't symmetrical. So balancing your frame does not mean that you should try to find symmetry. In fact, presenting a symmetrical frame in itself is almost breaking the rule of balance. Wes Anderson is the master of serving up a symmetrical frame, and that's very much a creative decision.
The 180-degree rule
Now, I'm going to demonstrate the 180-degree rule for you using a 3D scene from Envato. Now included in your Envato subscription, you get access to a huge range of professional 3D assets: full 3D models, as well as templates for Spline and Blender, and a massive library of high-quality scenes from KitBash.
Couple that with millions of stock videos, photos, and high-quality music, sound effects, and professionally created studio-quality motion templates, and you've basically got an entire creative studio at your fingertips.
Now, I'm using a simple scene with a couple of little cartoon characters in front of a restaurant to show you how the 180-degree rule works. Let's frame up a two-shot of them in front of the restaurant. Now we'll draw a line at the characters' feet, perpendicular to the angle of our initial shot.
So for our single shots, we could go where the arrows are, for instance, but we couldn't cross the line and shoot them from behind.
So let's see what that looks like. This is the single on the guy, with the camera close to the line but not crossing it. Our background, although dramatically different, still has the same details to keep the viewer oriented. It's easy to see that this is the same building.
We can then frame up the single on our woman here, but pull the camera out from the line a bit to have a closeup with more of the original background, further anchoring our audience to this scene.
Makes sense? Of course it does. Well, what does it look like when you cross that line? Let's say from our original two-shot, we wanted to get coverage of the guy still shooting over the shoulder of the woman, but this time crossing that line.
As you can see, we've lost all reference to our original background, but we're also seeing a completely different side of our subject's face. The impacts of the lighting are different, and ultimately it just feels a bit off to look at. So that's why we tend to stick to the 180-degree rule in shot composition.
Leading lines
We touched on leading lines earlier, but it's worth going into in more detail.
Similar to the rule of thirds, the general idea with using leading lines is to put your subject or the main focal point of the image on the intersection of these leading lines, but this time they're physically within the frame.
Kubrick uses this technique a lot. Classic shots from 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and Dr. Strangelove all heavily employ leading lines to direct the viewer's attention. And that last example shows that the line doesn't even necessarily need to be a straight line.
Or take these couple of shots from Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker as a very literal example. The train tracks here are two lines that are leading us to the character and the action, and then this shot from the same sequence shows a series of lines leading from the unexploded ordnance to the character as he's disarming it.
Let's hit the streets with Hayden now and look at shot composition through a photographer's lens.
As you walk around a city, you can see leading lines everywhere. For example, I really like the way that the shadows on this building are accentuating the lines that are already there.
But it's not just about buildings. When we talk about leading lines, light plays a big part in that. You can also use the play of light and shadow to create leading lines.
Words can also be really good for creating leading lines. In this image, the letters do the same thing that a building line would do and draw your eye to one spot.
In an alleyway like this, there are very obvious leading lines from the buildings running alongside each other. But you could also look for more unconventional leading lines, such as the way the light is falling on this building.
Frames within a frame
Another technique that makes for some interesting shot composition is to look for a frame within your frame. Find objects or features of the surrounding architecture, for instance, to frame up your subject within that frame, and that really forces your viewer's attention to a single point, a similar approach to leading lines.
Let's again check this out through Hayden's photography lens.
Now let's take a look at the Hollywood version of a frame within a frame. You can see that it's used in a variety of ways—not only as tool for composing your image, but often as a storytelling device. The two often go hand in hand.
You can use a frame such as a doorway or a window within a location to separate the character from the audience, providing a voyeuristic angle and giving us a sense that we're looking in on them rather than being part of that scene.
Sometimes, you can use a frame within a frame to bring us into the mind or the thought process of the character, particularly when we use a mirror as the frame. And sometimes it's purely used as a framing device along similar lines as the leading lines. We can use a physical frame within the scene to draw our attention to a specific focus point.
So there we go. We've covered all of the general rules of shot composition for videography and photography. Of course, rules are made to be broken, but these are great guidelines to shoot by, especially if you're learning. Once they become second nature to you, you'll be able to break these rules and experiment to find ways to make cool compositions within your shots. You can get really wonderful and wacky shots when you start to break these rules, but you have to know them first.
So I hope this introduction to the concept of shot composition in your frames has been helpful. If you want to improve your filmmaking, check out the massive range of creative assets available at Envato—the only creative subscription you'll ever need. And read more free filmmaking tutorials from Envato Tuts+:
Exploring the World of Aspect Ratio
10 Rules for Better Shot Composition Framing in Photography and Film
How to Get Steady Motion in Video Shots Hand-held, Without Using Any Equipment
How motion capture and 3D is transforming film and TV
What is Feminist Film Theory? A Beginner’s Guide
The Rise of AI in Film Making: How AI Is Revolutionizing the Industry
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