From the course: Learning Cinematography: 1 Narrative Fundamentals
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Communicate with shapes
From the course: Learning Cinematography: 1 Narrative Fundamentals
Communicate with shapes
- Composition is the placement of people and objects in the frame, to tell your story in the most powerful way possible. At the most basic level, composition means communicating ideas, using shapes and visual patterns. This is important because cinema is unique among art forms, and that it involves communicating ideas physically. This is different from the written word, or music, or even painting. One of the most important things to understand about shooting a movie, is that we're not actually telling someone a story. We're showing them a story. A novel tells a story. It describes what's happening in words. A novel can communicate the ideas of a character directly. Of course movies could use dialogue or voiceovers to have the character tell us what they're thinking. But that's not where the films real power lies. The real power of a great movie is that it can show the audience what the character is thinking. The obligation of the cinematographer who wants to fully exploit the true…
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