Composition Lesson Evaluation

In today's lesson we explored composition and how to frame our characters. The first thing we learned was the Rule of Thirds. The Rule of Thirds is a guideline on how to frame your shots in a way that shows your actors fitting comfortably on screen and makes your audience feel comfortable whilst viewing your film.

The rule of thirds makes you imagine a grid across every single one of your frames, where a horizontal and vertical line is placed to segregate the frame into thirds. Depending on where you place your character in the grid depends on how well you have framed your shot.

                                                      

There are several mistakes to look out for, one being bad headroom. Headroom is the space between the top of a characters head and the top of the frame. Bad headroom would indicate extra amounts of irrelevant space above their head, or alternatively, the top of your characters head has been cut off.

Another mistake which can be made whilst framing your shots would be bad noseroom. Noseroom is the space between the characters nose and the edge of the frame, which is only important if your character is positioned to face a direction which is not directly at the camera. Bad noseroom would show the character facing in the direction of the left of the shot, and their character place on that first vertical line on your rule of thirds grid. It would look as though your character is about to bump into something your viewers are unaware and leaves an uncomfortable amount of extra frame behind them.

The picture on the left shows bad nose room. The actor is too far left in the frame when that is the direction in which they are facing.

This picture shows good noseroom, viewers can see where the actor is going and it does not look like they are going to bump into the edge of the frame.

Here bad headroom is demonstrated. There is too much space between the top of the characters head and the top of the frame. The character looks like they are falling out of the frame.








This is good headroom because the top of the head is not cut off and there is a small amount of space between the top of the head and the top of the frame. The character is framed well.