So in the first part in this series, I talked about the Natural focal elements and now we are going to talk about focal element creators which cinematographers use to achieve the focus when the Natural focal elements are not existing.


01. Guidelines

Guidelines are a very commonly used technique in movies and tv-shows and we have seen this technique used from the simplest low budget movies to Oscar-winning movies.

How the Guidelines work?

Our brain is trained to see lines and geometrical shapes, so they always stand out from the rest of the other unordered elements in that scene.

When there are guidelines (I’ll show an example) in a scene our brain will follow the line until it reaches an end or goes out of the frame.

So what we use in the movies are a couple of guidelines that converge to one point so that our brain will automatically follow the line to convergence and when you place the object you want in focus in the convergence point our brain will adjust focus to that point.


The majority of the movies we see use straight guidelines where it’s easy to set up in a scene and those are the ones that are obvious to the eyes like in the above scene. There are clip art artists who use curve lines as guidelines in their artworks because they are not so obvious to the eyes and lots of those arts naturally consist of lots of curves.


02. Framing

Framing is one of the key things to think about in any artwork from simple clip arts to movies and tv- shows. From Stage dramas to Movie framing plays a key part in the story. So it’s easy to give some examples and explain how the framing was used to add a new dimension to the story.

Negative space:

Let’s look at this scene from UP 2009, this is the part where they are heading hopelessly to find a new life in a new place. In the scene, the house is on the left side to the frame, and their lots of space remaining in the sky is called negative space.




Frame within a frame:

This is also a common technique used in movies and TV shows to show and highlight the emotions of the characters like in the following picture.


You can see that the director can capture the scene from any different angle rather than using these steel frames as a virtual frame in the scene. Adding that virtual frame between the subject and the camera, adds more emotions to the scene and since the subject seems to be constraint by the virtual frame, this gives the audience a hint of what goes on this character's lifestyle.



You can see in the above scene director wants to show the limit of freedom these characters have in the story by constraining them in a virtual frame.

03. Scale


Scale is used to show which character has the dominancy in a scene. Like in the following scene where 3 people having a conversation.

 In the first frame, two of them are in the foreground having a conversation while another one is in the background and since he is small in scale it communicates that that person is not that important to the particular conversation happening in the scene.

 In the 2nd frame, you can see the same conversation but the person in the back now is in the foreground with the other 2 joined and now he has the biggest screen space relative to the other characters and this conveys to the audience that now he holds the dominance in the conversation. So the audience will pay great attention to this man. This is a great use of scale in cinematography. 



 This is one way of using the scale of a subject to express the authority of that subject in that particular scene. 


04 Eye Lines of subjects


This feature and guidelines have some similarities but guidelines use elements in the scene directly to converge the audience's of focus to one place but this technique uses the eye lines (direction of their eyes are pointed at) of the subjects in the scene to achieve that.






What happens is normally there’s a focus element in a scene by default like if there’s a human being in a scene our focus goes to him and then that person curiously looking at something else in the scene our eyes also follow those eye lines to find the point they are looking.


05. Geometry (Symmetric)


Your brain likes to see symmetric things, we can see symmetry in Nature from animals to trees and even humans have the symmetry in their body.

 Have you ever thought why these religious buildings always being symmetric and not asymmetric?

 The main reason is these religious places want to attract people. Every religious building I have seen is symmetric, from Church and Mosque to Buddhist Temples and every other religion uses the same symmetric buildings to attract the followers they need.

 The same theory applies to the Movies and TV shows, people use symmetric elements in their artwork, like in the following pictures where the house placed at the end of the road is symmetrical and naturally our focus ends up in the house making the trees in the foreground ignored by our brain.  



 You can see in the 2nd picture that the building is symmetric and it is the only symmetric thing in the picture so that the viewer’s eyes will be immediately sat on the building. (They have kinda used some guidelines in that picture as well.)

Thank You!! Read the first part of this article -----> Click here.