Open Source Empathy

Yes, everything about me is fucked up, but what if that was secretly awesome?

As a 19-year-old sophomore at Stanford, Elizabeth Holmes decided to transform diagnostic medicine so she dropped out of college and used her tuition money to start her own company, Theranos. Ten years later, Holmes, pictured here holding a micro-vial, is on the cutting edge of medical technology — her new blood testing method allows hundreds of tests to be run using only a few drops of blood. And, Holmes’ methods are cheaper, faster, more accurate, and less invasive than conventional methods which often require a separate vial of blood for every test. As Holmes told Wired.com earlier this year, “I started this company because I wanted to spend my life changing our health care system. When someone you love gets really sick, most of the time when you find out, it’s too late to be able to do something about it. It’s heartbreaking… We wanted to make actionable health information accessible to people everywhere at the time it matters most. That means two things: being able to detect conditions in time to do something about them and providing access to information that can empower people to improve their lives.”

She is featured as Forbes’ youngest self-made woman billionaire.

Her tests will revolutionize the public health world as we know it; Making diagnostic testing accessible and affordable for more people (and potentially saving Medicare and Medicaid ~$100 billion each over the next decade). (x)

She is a coauthor on 82 US and 189 foreign patent applications. (x)

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.