Untitled

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 mostly symmetrical composition, with the gun being asymmetrical to help it stand out. The visual weight of the left is balanced on the right. 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.

So far, the villains have been soft lighting, background blur (shallow DOF), CGI, digital cameras, and now we can add central compositions to the pile.

But if you look at the best looking movies throughout history, many filmmakers used all of those things, in abundance, to great effect.

It's a matter of ratio, intensity, taste, and effort.

Knowing when to use hard vs soft light.

Knowing how to use soft light while keeping the image dimensional and not flat.

Knowing how much to blur the background to get good subject separation.

Mixing practical with CGI to give the effects grounding and real world lighting reference.

Making sure your central subject framing is well designed and having the taste to know you can't just stick something in the middle and get a good shot without all the other compositional variables considered.

If I could assign bad visuals to one villain, it would be low effort.

If you use soft lighting because it is easier to make look good than hard lighting, that is a low effort issue, not a soft lighting one.

If you blur the background to mush because you didn't want to put in the effort to create an interesting set or go to a beautiful location, that is low effort, not shallow depth of field.

But often, low effort visuals are the only option available. Filmmakers are given a day to shoot and not enough time and money to prepare. They are told to just use a green screen. They are told to light things flat so they can just fix it in post and easily blend the VFX.

The high effort options are not always available to every director. They are just a cog in a capitalist studio machine that demands efficiency over artistry.

So when these critics blame the artists for not knowing their craft rather than blaming the systems they have to work within, it makes me very frustrated.

And if we take away all of these vital tools to create visuals, it will not make things look better. You just get low effort hard light, deep depth of field of boring backgrounds, bad practical effects, all with everything framed on a rule of thirds grid line.

But hey, at least it is shot on film!

For all those of you who kindly were part of assisting me in pulling together the cash to get the Eye Problem handled (in the short term, anyway. Want to throw something into the pot, still?* Right here.) I'm heading up to town to see the Eye Lady tomorrow. Sooner than I thought: but very welcome.

"Bring all your old glasses," her assistant said, ever so casually. (snorting) I'd need to bring an overnight bag. Never mind: I've got enough of them easily-packable to get by with. My Eye Lady and I have been working together for pushing thirty years now, and all my most recent info's in her firm's computer. The only thing I need to do is measure my current sitting-down-to-big screen distance to match up to what she'll be doing for my "reading glasses".

The part of this discussion I'm least eager to have with her? The part where I have to explain to her that @petermorwood will not be coming in to renew his (also always belatedly renewed: he hated that his vision was no longer perfect) prescription. ...And when she asks me why I was so late coming to her for new glasses, all I'll be able to do is shrug and say: "I wasn't thinking about my own vision so much. The only thing I really wanted to see last year was the one thing it would never again be able to show me."

(sigh)

ACAB obviously but English fans tend to be cunts wherever they go.

If we don’t take action now nothing will ever get better.