the dogs^ name is Steve

When you are just starting out learning about crafting visuals, the "rule of thirds" is given to folks as training wheels. If you don't know what you are doing, it is a good way to force people to think about their framing and avoid obvious snapshot compositions.

The idea is that if you gain experience and get better, you will shed those rule-of-thirds training wheels and start thinking more deeply about composition.

Eventually, you learn that central compositions can be done well and may gravitate back to them. Professionals use central framing all the time and some use it almost exclusively. You can play with focus and symmetry and layered compositions. It's a great way to draw the eye with leading lines. The idea is that you put the subject in a central position and then the secondary subject and the periphal context support the subject.

This movie was not made for TikTok or vertical viewing. That Twitter user overlayed the vertical video lines to demonstrate their point, and it ended up proving them wildly incorrect.

Remember that composition, more than anything else, needs to serve the story.

Let's look at how this falls apart.

How does this composition work without the other kids gossiping about her? This composition was constructed to show she is a school pariah. If it were on TIkTok, she'd just be walking down a hall.

Here we might not even know these are legs.

Here you can't tell she's hiding in a bathroom stall. Never has a roll of toilet paper been so important to a composition.

Have some random fingers, TikTok.

The subject is actually the glowing hands. This is a symmetrical composition, not a central one. Her in the mirror is not actually the subject.

I'm pretty sure that floating mouse needs to be in frame. TikTok gets an eyeball and a thumb to figure out what is going on.

You get one leg to figure this one out. Good luck.

I did find one single scene where the entire context could be shoved into a vertical video format.

That is the only shot that would work on TikTok out of the entire trailer.

What most people call composition is actually just subject framing. Which can be an important part of the composition, but it is only one variable.

I'm going to steal from another post of mine because I don't feel like writing essentially the same thing over. But I detailed how a professional visual author thinks about composition beyond just framing and rule of thirds...

Things that are often considered when designing a shot… background, midground, foreground. Symmetry or asymmetry. Primary and secondary subjects. Visual weight and balance. Visual anchors. Subject separation via depth of field, background/foreground exposure ratio, contrast, or color palette. And most importantly… storytelling.

Let's think through the composition of this shot.

I prefer to think back to front. What do I want the viewer to see?

Background is the sky. Midground is the town. Foreground is Michael B Jordan.

They chose a symmetrical composition. Symmetry is a powerful and dramatic visual anchor. If you would rather the viewer chew on the environment and absorb the entire frame, you may frame the subject off-center.

The primary subject is his face and the secondary subject is the gun. You can tell this because the gun is out of focus. They want you to visually anchor your attention to his expression. The angle of the gun even has a leading line that goes straight to his eyes.

Subject separation is mostly done with an exposure ratio. He is dark against a bright white sky. There is some background blur as well.

The camera is slightly below his eyeline, so it is looking up at him. This gives him a sense of power and control. He is dangerous and imposing. They are using a strong central framing with a low perspective as storytelling tools.

All of those creative decisions are part of composition. If all you consider is subject framing, your shot is probably going to be weaker for it.

I agree that there is some content being made more friendly for watching on phones. But even with shows and movies, most people still make the effort to turn their phone sideways. So I don't think this central framing thesis holds any water. I think it was just a compositional preference by the filmmakers.

Either that or Wes Anderson was a visionary, creating the most TikTok-able movies before the platform even existed.

And it turned out I also couldn't watch the movie. I fell asleep in class both days we were watching it.

This, of course, meant I had to cheat on my essay.

And I got an A.

The essay was to compare the book and the movie and discuss the changes and how that affected the story.

Well it turned out Sparknotes had an entire section devoted to comparing and contrasting the book and the movie. Using that, and flipping to pages mentioned in Sparknotes to read sections of the book, I was able to bullshit an A paper.

But see the thing is, that this kind of 'cheating' still takes skills, you still learn things.

I had to know how to find the information I needed, I needed to be able to comprehend what sparknotes was saying and the analysis they did, I needed to know how to USE the information I read there to write an essay, I needed to know how to make sure none of it was marked as plagerized. I had to form an opinion on the sparknotes analysis so I could express my own opinions in the essay.

Was it cheating? Yeah, I didn't read the book or watch the movie. I used Sparknotes. It was a lot less work than if I had read the book and watched the movie and done it all myself.

The thing is though, I still had to use my fucking brain. Being able to bullshit an essay like that is a skill in and of itself that is useful. I exercised important skills, and even if it wasnt the intended way I still learned.

ChatGTP and other AI do not give that experience to people, people have to do nothing and gain nothing from it.

Using AI is absolutely different from other ways students have cheated in the past, and I stand by my opinion that its making students dumber, more helpless, and less capable.

Actual bill name: Stop the Sexualization of Children Act.

Purported purpose: "to protect children from being exposed to explicit material in the classroom".

How it's sold in the press: "Ban strippers and porn from classrooms!"

Actual text of the bill: Expands the meaning of "sexually explicit content" to include the words "or involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism".

Not and. Or. Meaning "involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism" is in and of itself enough to be classified as sexually explicit.

It's a conspiracy theory, plain and simple, and rationalizing it to explain why you believe a conspiracy theory doesn't make it less unhinged, it just shows to what length you're willing to go to excuse antisemitic conspiracy theories.