TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to the Lights Film School video tutorial on framing heights. In this video we’ll discuss the importance of properly cropping your subject within a frame. Three common mistakes filmmakers often make when framing a subject are:

1. They leave too much ‘room” above the subject’s head which creates “dead space”
2. They fail to leave enough room above the subject’s head “clipping” the top of their head with the top wall of the frame. While this may be advisable for some close-up shots, this is not advisable for medium or full shots.
3. They “cut off” or “amputate” their subject at the joints of their limbs.

Let’s start by looking at a full shot.

Notice how your entire subject fits nicely within the frame. A full shot is great for providing context as well as orienting your audience geographically within your world. The full shot allows more than one character to be in the frame at the same time and it’s wide enough to allow your characters to use body language to express themselves. Notice how a bit of room is left both below our subject’s feet and above his head.

Next we’ll look at the medium full shot.

This shot is similar to the full shot but instead of cropping below the feet we are making our first cut just above the subject’s knees. Notice there is still room above the subject’s head at the top of the frame.

Next we’ll look at the cowboy shot

Enough space is left below the waist of the subject so if they dropped their hands their wrists would not be cut off with the bottom wall of the shot. This is of course helpful for cowboys who need quick access to the guns in their holsters. In non-western films this shot is equally important for subjects who simply wish to put their arms down to their sides.

Next, we’ll look at a medium close shot

The medium close shot is a great shot when you want to include even less environment and gain more insight into the emotional state of your character. Small emotional nuances may start to register with this image size. That being said, this shot is still wide enough to fit multiple elements within the frame. This shot choice allows you to multitask the character’s emotional state with their body language while at the same time giving you the opportunity to include other characters, props or surroundings.

Next we have a close shot.

This is really one of the first shots when we’ve made the commitment to focus primarily on the emotional world of our character. Notice how in this shot we’re slightly clipping the top of his head with the top wall of the composition? Let us take a moment to fix that by ensuring that the top wall rides just a sliver above our subject’s head… Much better! The actor’s face is the main tool used to convey information when you’re in this close. As we continue to move closer to our actor his body can still communicate expressiveness, but it’s the actors face, and specifically his eyes, which start to become the centrepiece for these shots.

Punching in even closer we have the wide close up

Close up shots are used to gain access into the inner world of your characters. The top part of the frame usually rides just above the top of your character’s head while the bottom of the frame includes just a sliver of the arm as it starts falling off from the shoulder.

Let’s give our character a little bit of lead room which will give him some breathing room and help ensure that our frame has a more dramatic sense of balance… There we go.

Now let’s talk about the full close up.

This shot can be tricky since the framing can quickly become awkward if we loose the subject’s eyes or chin. As a general rule of thumb you want to keep the subject’s eyes in the top 2/3rds of the frame and you don’t want to clip the subject’s chin with the bottom frame of the composition. In this shot we’ve included a little bit of the subject’s shoulders and now we’re allowed to cut the top of his head with the top wall of the composition.

A medium close up.

A medium close up will punch in a little bit closer. Notice we start to loose more of the top of the subject’s head. His chin is also getting dangerously close to the bottom wall of the frame. The benefit to this shot is that it allows you to dig even deeper under the character’s skin to see what is beneath the words they are saying.

It should also be mentioned that budget minded Independent filmmakers often like tighter shots like this because they are cheaper and quicker to light.

Now let’s move into an extreme close up.

An extreme close up goes a step further and we allow the chin to dip below the bottom wall of the composition. In this shot we frame the bottom wall just below the subject’s lips This is as close as we can get into the inner world of a character before moving into macro close ups.

Macro close ups.

Macro close ups allow us to feature a particular part of the body. For example a wrist watch, as we can see in this case. This shot is common when a filmmaker is trying to punctuate a narrative point. For instance a character walking along the side of a desolate highway at night by the themselves might hear something moving in the bushes to the side of the road. The filmmaker in this case may decide to shoot a macro close up of the character’s ear to help “punctuate” the sound.

There are no absolute rules for framing heights. Many filmmakers will simplify framing height terminology by using only three loose terms: Full shot, medium shot and close up. The definition of some of these framing heights vary from set to set. So make sure you talk with your crew members beforehand to make sure you’re all on the same page.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello and welcome to our tutorial on Head-Room, Lead-Room and Anticipatory Framing. For this tutorial we’ll discuss all of these concepts providing visual examples along the way. Let’s begin by talking about Head-Room. 

What is Head-Room? – Head-room is the space between the top of your subject’s head and the top frame of the composition

Let’s look at our first shot “here”. Our actor is sitting and reading a paper. At first you’ll notice we’re not giving him much breathing room above his head so let’s “inch up” just a little bit so we’re skimming the top of his head with our frame. There we go. Much better.

As a general rule of thumb your subject’s eyes should be placed roughly in the top third of the composition. 

As you can see, if we tilt up further we add an undesirable amount of head room above our subject’s head. The space above his head becomes what is known as “dead space”. 

Now let’s push it to the extreme to see what too much head room looks like. As you can see our subject’s eyes are now placed on the bottom third of the frame and we have an astronomical amount of dead space above our subject’s head.



Let’s move on now to discuss “lead room” and “nose room”. 

what is lead room?

Lead room is the space where dramatic energy is directed. For close up shots, lead room will often be referred to as “nose room”.

Let’s have a look at this composition with the man looking camera right and reading a book. 

Notice how we left more space in front of his face because he’s projecting energy in that direction? 



Now let’s look at what happens when you don’t leave enough lead room.

Notice how the energy being projected forward towards camera right is being pre-emptively cut off by the right wall of the composition. There is more space behind the subject than in front of him.

Almost everything you’ll be interested in filming will have an energy to it: For example, a rolling ball, a moving car or a man reading a book. You need to take this into consideration when framing your shots. 

It should also be mentioned that these rules should be used as guidelines that work most of the time. However, there may be times when you might find creative or narrative motivation to include less lead room or more head room. David Lynch’s film “Elephant Man” for example uses an abnormally large about of head room, while some filmmakers may wish to use less lead room to give the shot a bizarre sense of balance or to purposely hide visual information from your audience. So experiment with what feels right for your story.

Now lets discuss anticipatory framing

Anticipatory framing establishes that the camera needs to anticipate the movement within a scene rather than react to it. If you’re reacting to movement you’ll generally end up with jerky, reactionary shots. You want to be able to predict the movement within a frame. This is even more difficult for documentary filmmakers who often don’t have the privilege of marking or blocking out their scenes. For this reason it’s important that filmmakers practice camera operation.

A great way to practice camera movement is to have a friend walk back and forth in the frame while you try to keep them properly positioned within that frame. Try to “feather in” and “feather out” at the end of your movements. Remember that your camera represents your audience within a scene.

You’re supposed to be creating an “invisible 4th wall” between your actors and your audience. An uncontrolled camera won’t be strong enough to support the 4th wall and instead of engaging in the story, your audience will be constantly reminded of the people standing behind the camera, which will break the illusion you’re trying so hard to create. The camera shouldn’t draw attention to itself. It should be controlled, subtle and motivated by the movement within the frame.

If you’re editing other shots or shooting on more than one camera make sure the movement and dynamism of each shot can be integrated into other shots in the scene. This is called the choreography of movement. And to us filmmakers it’s our own little ballet. So you need to figure out the “tempo” of your movement which will then in turn determine what type of dance you’re doing.

Here is an example of what not to do

You need to avoid jerky, corrective and reactionary shots. If you’re operating a camera and you make an adjustment for a framing error, simply retake your shot. Do not use these shots in your final video. A shot with uncontrolled movement will temporarily draw attention to the camera and pull your audience out of your story. Your goal as a filmmaker is to keep your audience as engaged in your story as possible. You want your stories to be creatively as well as technically well constructed.

Movement is an essential part of cinematic expression and it’s important that you don’t prioritize convenience or ease over technically well-constructed shots.

We’ll publish another blog post about how to light a documentary interview, but this blog post will tackle the subject of properly capturing enough “cutaway shots” for editing purposes.

In documentaries jump cuts are even more important to try and avoid. Jump cuts are jarring transitions where the subject seems to move through the air or abruptly change position. Imaging for example that you were being interviewed and then you said something boring, then changed your position and then continued the interview. The editor of the documentary would edit out the boring part and piece to the two usable snippets of footage together, but your change in position (no matter how slightly) would cause what is referred to as a jump cut.

Let’s imagine for example, that you’re interviewing a subject in their apartment and they are exposing great ideas in their dialogue but then for 30 seconds they “hum” and “um” and stumble over the words, you’ll likely want to cut that out. However, when you cut out 30 seconds of footage the two good pieces of interview won’t visually fit together perfectly. You’ll notice a slight change in your subject’s body position. This will lead to a jarring transition and will lower the perceived production value of your documentary.

To solve this problem you can use cutaways. These are shots that are related in some way to your subject’s story or of your subject themselves. For instance, let’s say you need to cut out 30 seconds of footage from an interviewee who is discussing homelessness in his or her city. Staring at your edit point you could insert cutaway footage of homeless people engaging in the activities that the interviewee is discussing during the next clip. This way you are just using the usable audio but when you transfer back into the interview the subject will not appear to have jumped to a new position. It will look harmonious and continuous.

The second option is to use cutaway footage of either the subject’s body language or reaction footage of the interviewer listening. By inserting this footage at the start of an edit point you can create the illusion of continuity without the jarring visual effects.

You could also use footage that either compliments or contradicts what the subject is saying. For example, if they are telling you a story of how modest they live but their home tells another story, you might decide to capture some “b-roll” footage of the interior of their house. You can use these as cutaway shots to merge the 2 shots that and sew the footage back together.

Another idea is to remember to gather some reactionary footage of the listener. This is the easiest footage to get yet some of the most forgotten footage to capture. You’ll thank yourself in the editing room if you have the option of using any of these types of cutaway shots.

1. It exposes story structure
2. It exposes the technical attributes to the film / video
3. It exposes compositional elements to the film / video

Today we have deconstructed the Bjork music video entitled “All is Full of Love”. It was directed by music video director genius Chris Cunningham. We hope you find our music video deconstruction helpful. The video can be viewed below:

Below, we’ve outlined how we’ve deconstructed the video. We’ve counted locations, scenes (i.e. edit points), we’ve identified the color palette, the length of each shot and the compositional attributes to each scene (i.e. whether the shot was a close up, medium shot or B-roll). It should be noted that some numbers needed to be estimated or rounded for simplicities sake. However, we’ve tried to make the numbers as accurate as possible. Enjoy!

Number of Shots:
There are a total of 60 edits points. The entire video is made up of 60 clips fitting within 4 minutes and 10 seconds.

Camera movement:
8 of 60 shots (roughly 13%) of shots are moving. The remainder (roughly 87% of shots are static).

Color palette:
There is a strong color palette composed of blues, whites and blacks with small highlights of oranges and reds.

Number of locations:
There is only 1 location with camera coverage from different angles

Length of each shot:
The shot length ranged from less than 1 second in length to 24 seconds. There were only 6 scenes that were over 10 seconds long (roughly 10%) and only 4 shots over 20 seconds in length (roughly 6%).

1 second in length: 20 shots (33%)
2 seconds in length: 14 shots (23%)
3 seconds in length: 8 shots (13%)
4 seconds in length: 3 shots (5%)
5 seconds in length: 4 shots (6%)
7 seconds in length: 1 shot (2%)
10 seconds in length: 6 shots (10%)
20 seconds in length: 4 shots (6%)

Composition of shots:
This music video uses great pacing and editing. The composition of shots is normal for a music video. Many interesting and artistic cutaway shots were used. We refer to these shots as “b-roll”. This includes shots of the equipment moving, the liquid hitting the floor etc. Most of the “b-roll” in this video is of the robotic equipment moving and really showcased depth, lighting, texture and movement.

8 close ups: (13%)
18 medium shots: (30%)
8 wide shots: (13%)
26 B-roll shots (mostly close ups / abstract etc): (43%)

We hope you find this exercise in  deconstruction helpful. As filmmakers it’s rewarding to watch the works of your favorite directors, DOP’s (Director of Photography) and editors to see how they design and structure their films and videos. It’s a time consuming exercise but you’ll learn a lot from the experience.

Best of luck on your future music video projects!

This blog post will focus on color and the benefits of color simplicity within a frame. However, in the future we hope to add additional blog posts covering the wide spectrum of other topics mentioned above.

Color simplicity is the process of limiting the array of colors that make it into the 4 walls of your image. Photographers spend a lot of time trying to find color simplicity in our visually chaotic world. Filmmakers have an even bigger challenge because our cameras move, which means the colors in our backgrounds and foregrounds will always be changing.

That being said, many filmmakers have found great compositional strategies that allow them to keep their frames organized from a color standpoint. The Cohen Brother’s last film “No Country For Old Men” started out with a breathtaking montage of landscape images that used a minimalist approach to color. In fact, the entire film was very well thought out from a color theory standpoint.

How to compose for color simplicity

To compose your footage for color simplicity you really need to understand what the colors “say” symbolically and how they interact together. Please look at the color wheel below.

Analogous colors are colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. These colors, when they appear together, provide a smooth and continuous tone. Colors that are located opposite to one another on the color wheel are complementary colors. When complementary colors appear next to each other they provide more of a dramatic and high contrast look.

Neither color strategy is correct over the other, but it is easy to both see and feel that the response from the viewer will be much different when they look at each image. For example, look at the following two photographs.

Example of Analogous Colors

Example of Complementary Colors

This is how you color simplify an image. You simply limit the assortment of colors that make it into your footage which allows you to control both the mood and tone of the scene as well as provide color symbolism.

To help enhance color simplicity you might also want to play around with color balance and color highlights. Look at the following photograph for example. Notice the image is predominately cool (blue) with only a warm (orange) highlight. Playing with color highlights is a great way to add interesting color components to your film footage.

If you’re a filmmaker, understanding color, color theory, color psychology, color simplicity and color balance is a must in order to be able to effectively set the tone of your scene as well as isolate your main areas of interest. Distracting colors, just as much as distracting objects, add unnecessary visual confusion and clutter to a scene. By simplifying your colors you help isolate the more important areas of your footage.

Happy Filmmaking!