So now we’re got good light and its in focus, what next? Composition of course! Even as video technology advances to point where it sometimes becomes difficult to distinguish between an image shot on film and an image shot by a camera there will always be ways to tell home movies from feature films, composition. This is where those how to film books get really worthless. Composition is how the image looks on your camera. Composition takes years to master, but this is a just a basic guide to filming, so here’s a few pointers.

There are five basic shots. Extreme long shot (ELS), Long Shot (LS), Medium Shot or Bust Shot (MS), Close-up (CU), and Wayne and Garth’s favorite, the Extreme Close-Up (ECU).

Examples:

Extreme Long Shot:	Long Shot:
Medium Shot 1:	Medium Shot 2:
Extreme Close-Up:	Low Angle:
High Angle:

The extreme long shot and long shot are often used as establishing shots. An establishing shot is the shot that gives the audience its sense of orientation in a scene. This is especially crucial when you have dialogue, so that when a character talks to another character off-screen, it doesn’t look he or she is talking to empty air. The medium shot it one of the most common shots, as it allows a great deal of flexibility while eliminating much of the useless parts of image, such as a characters lower half, which typically has little to do with the scene. The close-up is used to create a sense of intimacy between the character and the audience and to highlight important thoughts or emotions in a character. The is even more so with the extreme close-up.

Camera angles are also extremely important. The two main angles being high angle and low angle. A high angle shot means that the camera looks up at the subject, often endowing the subject with a sense of power. A low angle looks down on the subject, reversing the effect of the high angle and making it look small or weak. For excellent illustrations of the effects of camera angles study Orson Welle’s Citizen Kane. A third specialty angle it the Dutch angle. This is achieved by tilting the camera slightly, it can convey a sense of urgency or fear to a scene especially when it illustrates a characters reaction.

One of the most important guidelines to composition is the Rule of Thirds. According to this rule, if you divide a shot into nine equal parts (i.e. two vertical lines and two horizontal lines), the resulting corners of the inner most box are the points to which the human eye is naturally drawn to. Thus you can bring greater attention to a character’s face or an important object by placing it slightly off-center. An image that is centered of the frame is very stable, yet visually it is very inactive. You want your audience to actively watch and scan the image. By placing the images around the frame you encourage this visual activity.

There are a number of other ways to draw attention to key points in a frame. Among them are color, light, and movement, and rack focus. It is always important to make sure the important element contrasts slightly. An example of this would be a moving runner in a still park, or a child in a yellow rain coat running through grey and somber streets. A rack focus is a sharp change in focus to bring attention to objects in a different part of the frame, such as a phone that starts ringing in the foreground. All these techniques bring attention to what is important and away from the unimportant details of a scene.

Whenever people are in your shot it is always important to frame them right. Your characters must have head room, meaning you can’t have their top of their hair on or above the top edge of the frame, it makes them look cramped. Similarly you don’t want too much room between the top edge and the characters head or it make them look out of place and tiny. When a character moves within a frame it is always important to give them ample lead room. For example, if you’re filming a man as he walks morosely down a dirt path, as you track alongside the man you want give him enough room in front so that he looks like he is walking in the frame, not constantly on the verge of walking out of it. For an audience it can be very visually frustrating to watch a scene filmed like this.

When filming dialogue, or any other scene where you switch perspectives for that matter, it is always important to remember the 180 Degree Rule. According to this rule, there is an axis in any given scene that splits it into two halves. When shooting a scene that switches back and forth between perspectives, all shots must be made from the same side of the axis otherwise the scene will look mismatched. This is due to screen direction. You must maintain the same arrangement as was in your establishing shot. If you suddenly switch sides, the character who was initially facing right is now facing left from the new perspective, and since the other character is still facing the old direction, you have two characters facing left, and if they try to talk to each other that could very confusing with that whole physics principal with the whole two particles of matter, same place, same time bit.