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STORYTELLING THROUGH COMPOSITION

Good composition is one of those indefinable things - you just know it when you see it. What can a good composition do? It can show you more about the characters, give a feel or an emotion to an image, even tell a story.

Most of the things in this tutorial come from "stage craft" theory as told to me by a director friend as we watched "Behold a Pale Horse", a film noir from the 1960s. More bits of it come from my practice of these techniques while creating images. Even knowing all this, I believe composition is largely intuition and a lot of luck. It is NOT a precise skill. As you read this, please remember this is my own little way of doing things so basically this and fifty cents will buy you a donut. Also, I've found these techniques usually work best with one character, Hero Journey, scenes.

The story is that "stage craft" goes back to the days of real theatre with live actors. The stage might look like the image below. Certain parts of the stage came to have meaning of their own. That is, actors, were sent to different parts of the stage to depict the storyline of the play - or the character's emotional state - at that moment. It will be easier to show the different areas in just a bit.

The stage had depth.

 

Fast forward in time to movies and television - these are flat surfaces to the viewer. So flip the stage up, keep the areas the same and this supposedly is what many Film Noir directors oftentimes used.

Take away the extra stuff, and there's the canvas.

There's a couple things going on here. First is the left to right, beginning to end, the past to the present - very simply TIME. Imagine an image of someone going on a journey. Where would the character start? Is it a long journey? Is it a journey to the past or the future? Is it an emotional or physical journey? How far along is he in this journey? Could you reflect that in your scene? Could simply facing a character one direction or another show something very different about him or where he's going?

I wish I had better examples. I'll use a couple of my images however. First is a portrait. Look at where he is looking. Is he thinking about the future or the past?

Flipped horizontally, does it mean the same thing?

The other thing that seems to be going on with stage craft is the distance of the actor from the audience - at least on the stage. This translates to the up and down in a flat image. Heaven or Hell, down to earth and firmly planted compared to flighty, or etherial. Even with a flat image, distance can also be used, especially if you are using 3D programs.

A note about the Death area. That can represent despair, defeat and a whole variety of negative emotions and circumstances.

Here's an example of where I used the spiritual part of the "stage" to help tell a story.

And flipped horizontally, does it mean the same thing?

I highly recommend watching "Behold a Pale Horse" not only because it's an awesome movie but also because you can follow along with the character's journey and emotional state oftentimes simply because of where the director placed him on the screen. One of the most emotional scenes in there was the use of the "death" part of the stage. There's also some other really interesting things going on in this movie, scene set ups, ways to compose a scene so that is has even extra meaning, even the shadows and light help tell the tale. This or other Film Noir is the best way to see all of this in action.

Again, composition is NOT a precise thing. There's always room for creativity and experiment. But next time you see one of those things showing how to balance an image by splitting the paper up into nine squares, you'll know what they are for.

If you have questions, put them in the Chatbox. I will probably do a few renders over the next few weeks to specifically go with this tutorial.