Cinematic Composition: 5 Essential Framing Techniques

[00:00:00][Music] hey what's up today we're talking about framing [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay so here we are framing in this video we're going to cover five tips and ideas of framing your shots in a cinematic way in a way that support your story of course we could go on and on about framing in a million different ways but we're gonna keep it simple and we're gonna keep it essential to my top five probably uh favorite ways of framing up a shot and ideas that you can kind of keep in mind to again get that nice look so let's jump right in and the first thing that we're going to talk about are leading lines so i got my top down shot here with this xp pen 15.6 pro tablet which comes with this pen as you can see here and i'm just genuinely excited for this uh yes this was sent to me but they're not sponsoring this video i've been wanting this i'm going to be honest i've been wanting this for a long time i do a lot of photoshop work and uh okay it's gonna be useful for this video but in case you're wondering what i'm using that's what that is so let's jump into this first example here i'm gonna pop up a new layer boom one of the most interesting aspects is what do you have that is present into your scene that can help guide your viewer into the parts of the scene that you wanted to pay attention to so leading lines is pretty much what it sounds like is any kind of line a geometric shape that can help frame up your shot in an interesting way in a way that supports the action that you want your viewer to pay attention to so for example in this shot we have these sort of beams here that are acting as our leading lines and this is super interesting because i mean of course our subject is centered here so we don't need to really do too much to make sure that the audience is paying attention here but we're also opening up to a grander landscape and i don't want to get to that landscape focal point just yet i want to get there when she gets there with her emotions with feeling the sand and smell of the ocean and all that coming in we're not just there at that emotional moment just yet so we want to kind of uh build a little bit of anticipation in this shot so the purpose of this shot isn't to you know look at what's going on past these tree over here or what is you know beyond the horizon we still want to be locked with our subject and again it might seem random it might seem by chance but it wasn't you know you could really easily lose this sort of geometric uh symmetry and this sense of leading lines if you were crouched down a little bit more or if you're going for a more top-down shot or simply if you're just reversing the shot and you're just following her down just be aware of your surroundings so that your surrounding can actually serve what you're doing and not the other way around because a lot of times especially when you get caught up in a beach and vistas and all this it's very easy to kind of lose a sense of what really matters in that specific point in time so let's talk about when you could possibly maybe flip on the other side so what would that look like so you can see here that we still have a little bit of leading lines going on here it's not as extreme it's not as dramatic you again have these like shapes that are leading up to her as well this one's kind of going in the background but that's fine because this shot also serves as sort of setting the setting and the vibe so these palm trees here are nice but again it's also where it ends you're not staying there for too long and even if this leading line brings you there you're going back to the subject so all of this is again establishing the scene but also letting us really focus on what matters here which is the model with the product that we're trying to feature and another thing that connects them of course is the color you can see that the hues here are very similar to the bathing suit and this was actually done a little bit more later in post as far as matching the colors up a bit to kind of amalga it'll amalgamate them a little bit better together and uh you know keep that flow going so it gets pretty fun once you can really incorporate things like color palettes you know like lighting so okay i want to bring it back to that uh idea of sort of locking in that emotional moment when it comes to what we're paying attention to now the easiest way to force attention to a certain area of your scene is by your focus like what are you focusing on you're literally forcing people what to focus on with the focus of the lens in this point in time here we are focused on her but just before that we're actually entering the scene by focusing on on the landscape so in that previous emotional moment we're building anticipation so we don't want to look at what is beyond her just yet but then she gets there and now you can see that now this pose that she's in she's really embracing that environment she's really feeling that in and since this is for the most part from her perspective from her emotional perspective as well we want to feel those things when she feels them so when we get to this point now we're looking at the background now all of this is in focus she is still you know very predominant in the frame but again we're we're just taking this in almost as this like third-person perspective and we're feeling what she's feeling and of course sound and all of that stuff uh also helps this moment but then we go to her being in focus so we we sort of have this like tilt up push in and now she's in focus rather than the background it's a very simple shift we're kind of feeling the impact of what she's feeling with the scenery and the sound and then we're focusing on on her actually ingesting that information again it's all very subtle stuff you know it doesn't have to be that deep but it is little small decisions like that that overall they they help build up a certain emotive stay or certain emotional cues so okay let's move on from that and let's talk about something that kind of leads into the idea of leading lines and that is framing people in you can do that again with your environment in very simple ways with foreground objects or with uh simply how your scene is set up so here instead of having leading lines towards her we have sort of this like box that we've put her in i want to challenge you to think of your frame this this frame that you're seeing here a lot of times it's not super important to use every pixel of that frame in a way that communicates information to your audience constantly because that can be pretty tiresome so you know framing things it's not just where you want people to look at but it's also not straining that mental muscle from your audience at all times with every single shot that you're cutting to so framing things in in this way is a very useful way of saying yes we have a frame this big but don't worry about it we just want you to focus here and here for her it's just this section of finally getting that reveal of how she's feeling uh in this reverse shot and again the environment doesn't matter as much here especially when we're looking back we're not even looking at the beach so all of that information is irrelevant what matters is her and that's why she's boxed into this sort of frame now let me be honest it sounds fancier when you're breaking it down after the fact but when you are shooting these things it all comes natural it all comes through practice and it's by knowing what to look for that's how that practice can develop so that's when it comes to framing people in now another interesting sort of frame in that can happen with both lighting and your environment is this shot here from a short film that i did with my friend gavin ash we went to italy we shot this piece and there's this one moment here in the beginning where uh you know the the subject is framed into this uh this very interesting way and i gotta give credit where credit is due uh gavin ash actually set up this shot i walked over and was like this is amazing so he just knew what to do and uh as a side tip here always work with people like that work with people that are compatible with your vision that are you know with you two steps ahead and they're not catching up to what you're doing and uh so yeah huge shout out to gavin ash he's a very talented vp based in la so i'll leave his instagram in the description we are entering this world so we're not getting hit by the world all at once we're starting with a little slice of the world and we're seeing this person come into interview and little by little then from there we kind of again build that sort of sense of curiosity and anticipation to see what the point of this person in this world is so there you go another cool way of framing things in i could go on there's a few other moments from this short specifically that use that sort of technique and that sort of idea and uh you know aside from story element it's just very visually pleasing so okay moving on i feel like we're speeding right through these i hope i hope you're i hope you're liking this okay so here's something else that is not specifically about framing although it ties in but it is your focal length and the choices behind what focal length to use so we have this moment where we have our subject here and she's very small in frame when you compare to all of this sort of negative space here that we have and this negative space is met by uh sort of this explosive wave in this point in time in the video which seems to completely spray her and overwhelm her when in reality in this shot the model was completely dry like this the two weren't actually interacting and the way you can do this is by simply using a longer lens since long lenses they compress things so they'll compress your background with your foreground so they'll just like squeeze those planes in together just because of the nature of a zoom lens or a long lens and so this allows you to do some pretty neat tricks like this where this wave appears much bigger than what it is it's sort of getting into a bit of forced perspective and it's it makes the shot a lot more interesting because you're catching all of this stuff which is a bit more of like foreground and of course that also helps with having so much more detail in all of these particles and makes it a lot more visually pleasing in my opinion because uh you know you start to get a little bit of that bokeh and those highlights that make a very interesting look to this wave into this moment while still keeping the model and the bathing suit the product sharp and also just a quick side note the the wave of this it could have been again color graded to be this really bright sharp blue uh like we did with the sky earlier but now it's sort of matching a little bit of a more muted uh tone to not only match the texture of her bathing suit but also the time of day so a few things going on here but the main thing was that focal length uh choice that really made the scene feel epic so the same idea kind of goes for this shot right here which is shortly after this sort of moment that concludes this sequence and again it's it's not as obvious it's not as uh as much of an effect but it still connects the you know the model here with these waves in this background which you know it's it would have a very different feel of using a wide lens for one if you would use a wide lens you would have a horizon line right here just because you're much wider so you're going to see the horizon unless you're at a very extreme high angle which wouldn't be flattering for the model anyway so i didn't want to have a horizon line in this horizon lines there could be a whole video on that but horizon lines are very important as far as where you place them on screen and if there are any at all it really has a lot of uh psychology behind that and it has a lot of emotion tied to where your horizon line is in relation to your character a lot of times if it is above them it might feel like they're being suppressed by their environment or if they are towering over the horizon line it seems like they're more in control in this uh this time it's a little bit different than that it's not to show that she is being suppressed by by the environment but it's more to show how they are connected this is more about the connection to that water uh element so that's why using a long lens again we're compressing the background we're bringing that forward and she is fully surrounded by water which is i think is nice and it also brings out a ton more detail in all of these like wave elements and and all of this without again you know going into uh how pleasing it looks as far as getting all of this bokeh detail all this like light refracting through the waves and yeah it would just look and feel very different with a different lens and the reason why i'm mentioning focal length is because the way that you frame things up as i just mentioned with the horizon line changes a ton based on the lens that you use so your framing is directly affected by that okay so let's get into a lateral character placement i don't know if there's a term for this category but that's kind of what i'm calling it and it's essentially like where are you placing your character is it right in the middle are you placing them more at the edges of frame so you can create a little bit more of a negative space and all of that placement it has to be very specific because it drastically changes what you're trying to say in that one frame so for example let's uh take a look at this shot from one of these uh commercials again where it would it's it's a final moment it's the climax of all these emotions from the beach and all this and now she's just really taking in she's walking into the sand she's in the environment and this sort of peak meets the end logo of the brand and it is within this semi-silhouetted face we are now very deep into her emotive state which is now more more mental than anything else again you don't have to say like oh yeah that's what that's doing you know a lot of the stuff is very invisible and very subtle and it almost sounds a bit cheesy and what's the word what's the word um i gotta google this i hate when this happens pretentious that's the word but again i'm just highlighting this now just for the sake of breaking that down but it's not the way that people are viewing this stuff they're not thinking about this it's more of how this stuff connects with them at a subconscious level so let's take a few examples from a short film that i made once in a lifetime there's this very emotional moment where this son is visiting um their their dad and in this convalescent home and he's really trying hard to connect with uh with his father so having this kind of negative space that leads him and still keeping them close it helps sort of show his effort of trying to connect with them another way to use negative space for example would be the opposite maybe you want to show you know instead of having someone face this way and have the more natural sort of negative space that leads into a conversation leads into another person you could change the feeling just by i mean i know it looks weird that i'm facing a window but it still has that same type of feeling of tightness and of almost this claustrophobic sense that the character has nowhere to go so when you have someone that is feeling trapped or yeah like even chased by an actual threat just by having that negative space behind them it's almost like building that anticipation of something to pop up so that can build tension or again it can build that sense of loneliness to where they are not looking forward to anything they're just completely uh you know followed by emptiness wow that was a little depressing but yeah you could do a lot with negative space or leading space or centering uh the person dead in the center these are all very intentional things that again three very different uh types of emotions being displayed there so there we go uh that covers everything i'm so excited for this thing i'm gonna be using it a lot more on these breakdowns i hope you enjoyed this mixture of this plus this top-down view and drawing things out i like explaining things in a visual way so i'm definitely a fan of this and as a side note that i'll throw in here i'm really loving this tablet like having something that is like a whole different monitor that is also touch screen that also has a pen with such accuracy and all these pressure points and the tilting angle that it has there's all these things that when you're using photoshop maybe not in this very basic way of just drawing lines but when you're doing matte paintings and other stuff that we've talked about on the channel going from clicking with a mouse to this yeah it's nice and by the way if you are actually interested in getting a tablet like this one right now is a pretty good time because xp pen is having a black friday sale of up to 40 off that's a lot but i also want to thank the sponsor for this episode skillshare i'm honestly just genuinely a curious person so having just another source is great for me to not only explore things within my industry but also things that i'm just curious about maybe some hobbies i want to pick up but if we're going to be specific about framing and lighting and filmmaking here are some courses that i really recommend if you're just starting off i found this one to be super helpful visual storytelling creating emotion and narrative really like this one by joe simon and can be a great place to continue off from here and the nice thing is that you can also interact with different class projects so it's a great way to not just learn but also apply what you learn and yeah just a place to start and by the way if you are within the first 1000 people to use my link in the description to sign up you get one month completely free so use that month wisely you can go in check out a bunch of stuff and if you do like it sign up for the premium membership which is also very affordable since it starts at just under 10 bucks a month and they're always launching new premium classes so huge shout out to skillshare for sponsoring this episode really appreciate that and i think you will appreciate what they have on their platform because there's a ton of value there okay and with that being said that concludes this breakdown i hope you enjoyed it and let me know if you want to see more let me know in the comments section below it actually helps me a lot to look back at these things and kind of break down and really be more actively thinking about what my choices were right then and there but yeah i hope that breaking that process down uh has helped you and maybe has inspired you framing is just it's it's the greatest thing it's so good because it's free that's the main thing about framing it's you know sometimes with lighting you can use natural light you can get so far with that with what you have hanging around your house without starting to bring in some additional lights and things like that but framing is easy and free so if you want part two again let me know in the comments below if you enjoyed this video give it a like and if this is your first time subscribe if you like content like this or other filmmaking breakdowns or seeing how a music video or short film is made from the planning stage all the way to post-production so yeah we'd love to have you anyways thank you so much for watching i hope you enjoyed it my name is chris trini for chris cart and i'll see you next time [Music] you