up movie couple holding each others hands
source: UP - Disney

 The Composition is how one element (characters, objects, figures, etc) appear in the frame respected to the other objects and within the frame itself.

What is the best composition?


It is when the creators being able to convey the message to the audience without any interruption while the scene or the picture is very pleasing to the eyes of the viewer.

So there are 03 main dimensions in a Scene,

1. Focal Element
2. Structure
3. Balance

So in part 01 of this series will talk about the Focal element.

The focal element is what we see when we look at an image or what grabs our attention when a scene came up in a movie, for the first time.
So you might think this is what is in focus right? But no there’s more to the Focal element than the camera focus.

So there are different natural Focal elements in a scene like,

1. High contrast
2. Saturation
3. Camera focus
4. Motion
5. Faces or Figures (human figures)

These are the elements that we can naturally make in a scene to grab the focus of the audience.
Then we have the Focal element creators that are going to create the artificial focus in a scene. Some of these techniques have commonly used by some cinematographers to make a scene look better. I’ll try to give some examples and discuss how effectively they have used to grab the focus of the audience.

1. Guiding lines
2. Framing
3. Geometry
4. Diagonals
5. Scales
6. Eye line of subjects

So we will first talk about all the Natural focal elements since those are the commonly used techniques in movies.

01 High Contrast

different contrast used to creatw the focal point

You can see in the image how to simply we can use contrast to direct the focus to the one object in an image. The same concept is used in the movie but in a subtle way like in the following image.

contrast used to create the focus in a scene
source: StudioBinder

Contrast work in both ways either you want to focus something on a dark background you should brighten the object or if it is in the brighter background you should darken the object to achieve the focus to the element.

02 Camera Focus 


This is one of the most used techniques in the cinema industry and it is often used directly in the shooting. Camera Focus can mainly use to emphasize the feeling of a scene like whether it is interesting or boring.

In a flat 2D image, you get the feeling of boring, inactivity, silence, and lots of dark feelings like in the following image.

source: National Geographic

Camera Focus can be used to create depth in a scene. If it's a conversation between two people then you can use this technique to make that conversation much interesting. You might see lots of over the shoulder scenes in the movies where one guy's captured over the shoulder of the person he's having the conversation with.

use of depth in cinematography

Camera Focus is so important in the storytelling that even Animation movies also put lots of effort to perfect the camera focus like in the following scene from Toy Story 4 by Disney.

use of depth in Animation movies
source: Toy Story 4 - Disney

04 Motion



Motion is a key element in a scene it can be the movement of a camera or movement of a person or an object. Motion can be used very effectively to keep the focus of the audience in one particular object throughout the scene.

Joker (2019) where Joker dances in the stairs make the scene more powerful and at the same time more important to the movie since it gives the message that "Joker is no longer cares about what other people going to think about him at all".

joker dancing alone att the stares
source: Joker - DC

05. Faces and Figures

Our brain is very good at identifying Human faces and Figures. So it's easy to draw the attention of an audience to a human face or a figure in a scene but when the scene is crowded with more than one humans or figures then we have to use other techniques mentioned above to narrow done the focus.


Look at the above scene our eyes are drawn to the 2 human figures in the foreground and then our focus will go to the black horse rider in the background because of two things, first that it is a contrast dark figure in a light background, the second one is we can easily recognize the figure as a horse rider and our brain will register that as a focal point.

So that's all for Part 01 we talked about all the Natural Focal elements in the book and From Part 02. We will talk about the  Focal element creators I mentioned at the start. So keep in touch for that article as well.

Thank You!!!