ചേതസ്സ് സത്യമേവ ജയതേ നാനൃതം
The screen is like a painter’s canvas and looks what it really is – two dimensional. The Director’s eye needs to be familiar with few essentials of film-making. What are they?
- Composition
- Editing
- Script analysis
- Lighting
These essentials collectively yield the basics of seeing with a Director’s Eye, and is the basic of your confidence when you begin filming.
How do you analyse composition?
Today you have million materials for it. The digital world is visually interesting and exciting. How can we learn composition? It’s simple. Watch your eyes, how it reacts to a static composition and how it handles dynamic composition or composition in movement. Everyone’s eye doesn’t respond the same way. Those variations are an interesting discussion. Try an example: You are watching a picture. Your eye rolls round the image, formulating ideas about visual reflexes, and about what compositional components the eye finds attractive and engrossing. It’s a good start, simple, and you graduate to more abstract ones soon. Form ideas from gained confidence, and discover just how many classical elements can be found in what appears to be a straight record of life.
Questions you have to answer:
- Why did your eye go to that point in the image?
- When your eye moved, what did it follow?
- How much movement did your eye make before returning to the first point?
- What specifically drew your eye to each new place?
- What was the route your eye took, and what was the shape?
Here, we just discussed about how static composition attracts, how to analyse its visual rhythm. Everything we speak here isn’t the theory of film-making. There are things beyond theory and grammar too. But to go beyond that point, you have to know both ends. Visual composition isn’t just embellishment, its a vital element in communication.
