Strong compositional techniques 101

- [Instructor] In this movie we're going to talk about some basic composition techniques for our title sequence. Some of the things we're going to cover are contrast and legibility, proximity, the rule of thirds, golden ratio, a magical number, alignments, as well as leading lines. The first thing which should be of the uttermost importance is type legibility. You'll see here an example down below of text that just is getting eaten up by the background because the color of the text is so similar and clearly there's just not enough contrast. This can be fixed in a couple different ways. One is to have contrast by having thicker texts compared to the background and having a color that is it's opposite or highly different from the background object. When it comes to type legibility and title sequences you want to be hyper vigilant to the colors in your background. Sometimes your background has a lot of contrast and for you to simply change the contrast in the background to make it less would allow your type to pop more in the foreground. Clearly looking at this image we can see that it seems rather sporadic because things are placed randomly across the screen. But you simply take these words along with these images and place them together and it feels that they are now much more related because they're in close proximity. A lot of times with your title sequence you're going to keep the name of the writer and their actual name close together because they are related. In fact, it might be even similar in style. A really important rule when it comes to taking imagery with your digital camera stills or moving imagery happens to be a rule of thirds. In fact on your iPhone you can easily turn on this rule of thirds to help you with your compositions. When you lay out your title sequences it could be helpful to create a rule of thirds grid in a program such as Adobe Premiere using the Essential Graphics Panel's tools inside your program monitor and overlaying this on top of your images to see how your titles relate to the background image. Here are two from our title sequence within this course. You can see how Scott Cunningham's name is placed and how it relates to that image followed by the executive producer in this image here and how it lines up with a part of the rule of third grids. Now there are a lot of grids out there besides rule of thirds. When it comes to layouts of imagery in design for static images, there are a ton of other grids that you can use. I want to mention here an example of a Fibonacci grid where you can see how lines are placed across the screen in a specific order and how you might be able to use this advantage for your title sequence as well. Speaking of grids and layouts, there is also the golden ratio. This is sort of a magical number which allows people to divide their pages into specific sections. And through this division of pages layouts are created. You could use these same layouts or the overlay of the golden ratio to help guide where you might be able to place things such as text and compositing them in your screen. The other thing I like to do is actually use the magical number of the golden ratio. I like to take the number 1.618 and add a little bit of contrast between my main large text and my smaller text. My main text, like such as a lower third, and that the main part of the lower third is 1.618 times larger than the other text. We can't talk about title sequences without talking about alignment. You're going to want to be aware of how you align items on your screen, whether you're going to have everything as center lined as well as left or right aligned, not to mention alignment as your titles relate to the imagery that's behind it. You can see here an example of where your eyes are being led based essentially on this person's position on a mountaintop. Your eye might be drawn towards the sun how his foot is pointing towards it as well as his left arm pointing towards the alignment text. This is another principle known as leading lines and I brought back up the screen with no overlays. But I want you to pay attention to the person's knuckle and how you could draw a line from its tip over to the R in Robert and how that's drawing you towards looking at that title. You might look at some of the graphics that are placed on the wall as well and how that is drawing your attention to the title there in the right hand corner. So taking principles like this in terms of composition and becoming more familiar with them will allow you to create beautiful title sequences as well as be aware of how your titles will interact with the video images underneath.