Hello everyone!
Welcome to the first ever post of our Film Tips series. To kick things off, I (Rodolphe) will start with this basic tutorial covering the Rule of Thirds. I do plan on making more advanced video tutorials in the near future, not just articles, but for right now let's start things simple. The Rule of Thirds is one of the key guidelines to framing beautiful and interesting shots, so let's learn all about it!
Welcome to the first ever post of our Film Tips series. To kick things off, I (Rodolphe) will start with this basic tutorial covering the Rule of Thirds. I do plan on making more advanced video tutorials in the near future, not just articles, but for right now let's start things simple. The Rule of Thirds is one of the key guidelines to framing beautiful and interesting shots, so let's learn all about it!
What is the Rule of Thirds?
The Rule of Thirds is a guideline that helps you better frame and composite your shots. It states that you should imagine every image as being divided equally by 2 horizontal lines, and 2 vertical lines. The important parts of the image should fall on those lines, or on their intersection. The main goal of this rule is to prevent you from shooting everything dead in the center of your frame. Following this guideline will make for more interesting shots, rather than a boring centered image.
Like most rules in filmmaking, the Rule of Thirds can be viewed as a suggestion since sometimes you can break it, but for now let's go over some examples of why you really should be using it.
How to use it?
| Car is right in the center of the frame. | Following the rule of thirds. |
In the image on the left, the car is placed in the center of the frame. While it's not a sin to center your subject, it makes for a pretty boring shot. Also, look how much empty space there is under the car.... showing that much asphalt is pointless (unless the asphalt is our subject!).
The image on the right follows the rule of thirds. The left vertical line goes through the car, and the bottom horizontal line goes across the horizon. This adds more tension to the shot and makes it much more interesting.
The image on the right follows the rule of thirds. The left vertical line goes through the car, and the bottom horizontal line goes across the horizon. This adds more tension to the shot and makes it much more interesting.
| How your mother would do it. | How you should do it. |
Most people tend to center the face of the subject when they take a picture or film a video (left). Who can blame them? After all, they're not filmmakers like us! If you were to film that shot, I'm sure your result would be closer to the image on the right... right?
Not only does the image on the left suffers from too much headroom (Headroom is pretty much the space above the subject's head; we'll get more into that later), but the guy is also centered in the frame. When dealing with people, a good practice is to have one of the vertical lines go through the subject, and one of the horizontal lines (usually the top one) go through the eyes of the subject (right).
Not only does the image on the left suffers from too much headroom (Headroom is pretty much the space above the subject's head; we'll get more into that later), but the guy is also centered in the frame. When dealing with people, a good practice is to have one of the vertical lines go through the subject, and one of the horizontal lines (usually the top one) go through the eyes of the subject (right).
When dealing with wide shots with a horizon, you should avoid putting the horizon in the center of the frame. Doing so would "cut" the image in half. In the picture above, the bottom horizontal line goes across the horizon, and the right vertical line goes through the girl. If the subject (the girl) was perfectly centered in the frame, we would be seeing a lot of the grass at the bottom of the shot--which would have been pointless.
More examples:
| The cross is in the center... Yawn! Meh. | Following the rule of thirds... Yay! Better! |
Bottom line:
The bottom line is: Worry less about always centering your subjects; it is usually more interesting when you move closer to the edges. As I said earlier, most filmmaking rules are there to be broken so don't worry if you find yourself in a situation where the rule of thirds doesn't work. If there is a good reason why you feel your shot is better when centered, then by all means center that sucker!
Homework: Next time you watch a movie or a TV Show, look at the framing of the shots. I'm sure you'll find a lot of the Rule of Thirds being used.
Thank you for reading this tutorial! Hope you learned something new. For questions and comments, please comment below (I'll read all of them). Also, please share this around (links below) so the knowledge can spread!
-Rodolphe
-Rodolphe
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