Visual Composition in Film: An Illustrated Guide.

Published: November 15, 2024 | Last Updated: November 20, 2024

Composition is the arrangement and organization of visual elements within the frame to create a balanced and aesthetically pleasing image. This includes characters, objects, shapes, lines, colors, and space. How these elements are positioned, framed, and balanced helps guide where we look, what we feel, and how we understand the story.

The Core Elements of Visual Composition

The mise-en-scéne of objects and choice of color, contrast, leading lines, and every other visual element shape every frame you create. The director decides how much information each frame should contain and how it should be presented.

Sometimes, the composition might contain only a single item (as in the Kubrick example above), whereas, in others, it might be loaded with information, with a lot going on where each element craves attention, creating multiple focal points.

It’s up to the director to analyze and decide what should carry the most visual weight (if any), i.e., how elements in a frame draw attention, which should be decided by their importance. Without understanding visual weight, you can’t make informed decisions to control viewer focus and create balanced compositions.

Also, there are many ways to give elements in a scene visual weight, and they work together to create the final composition—these range from framing to camera movements and techniques, such as rack focus and even lens choice. Let’s start with framing…

Framing

Framing is the process of deciding what will be included (and what’s not) in the frame. It consists of choosing the camera angle, shot size, aspect ratio, and depth of field.

So, whereas composition is the arrangement of components, framing decides what will be included in the frame at any given time.

There are some well-establish guiding principles you should know when framing:

Center Framing

Center framing places the subject in the middle of the frame. This creates immediate focus and often suggests importance, formality, or isolation. It can establish symmetry or emphasize a subject’s relationship to their surroundings.

Stanley Kubrick is famous for his use of center framing. A good example is The Shining (1980), which uses center framing in many places—from close-ups of characters to hallway scenes—to create unnerving symmetry. It makes the hotel feel artificially precise, adding to its menace.

You can use center framing to create similar feelings of unease by making your compositions too perfect.

Rule of Thirds

The Rule of Thirds divides the frame into nine equal segments using two horizontal and two vertical lines.

The grid creates four intersection points and four lines that guide composition. Our eyes naturally gravitate toward these points rather than the center of an image.

For landscape shots, try placing the horizon on the upper or lower third line for landscape shots rather than the middle.

The Golden Ratio

The golden ratio, approximately 1.618:1, is often used in film to create aesthetically pleasing and balanced compositions. Due to its mathematical properties, it is considered visually appealing.

The golden ratio is important because it’s the mother of other “golden” compositional grids, such as the Phi Grid, the Golden Triangle, and Golden Squares/Circles. In other words, the golden ratio divides the frame into smaller areas and lines of interest:

Camera operators, directors, cinematographers, and editors use this ratio to guide the placement of subjects within the frame, design sets, and compose shots.

The Golden Triangle

The Golden Triangle divides the frame using a diagonal line from corner to corner, with additional lines from the other corners meeting the main diagonal at 90-degree right angles. This creates dynamic balance and guides eye movement through the frame.

The Phi Grid

The Phi Grid is similar to the rule of thirds but uses divisions based on the golden ratio to guide its framing.

Golden Areas of Interest (circles/squares)

At the most basic, though, the golden ratio divides the frame into smaller and smaller areas of interest, which can be shown as squares or circles.

In the example above from the beginning of the folk horror movie The VVitch (2015), notice how director Robert Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke compose the frame following the golden ratio. We have William and his family and the dark, imposing forest on the left. We have their settler wagon and Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) on the right. Already, we get a sense that Thomasin is special and somehow separated from the rest of the family.

Contrast

Contrast occurs when elements differ distinctly in tone, color, or texture. There are several ways to create contrast:

• Contrast by juxtaposition
• Contrast by lighting
• Contrast by color
• Contrast by size

High-contrast areas naturally draw focus, while low-contrast areas recede. Let’s take a look at some examples…

Contrast by Juxtaposition

Contrast is the result when you juxtapose two elements in a frame, such as characters, objects, emotions, and tones.

The example from Scott Pilgrim vs the World (2010) is a good example of contrast in composing a scene to display power dynamics. By placing Scott at the foot of the stairs and raising Gideon Graves and his love interest, Ramona Flowers on a podium towering above him.

Notice that Scott isn’t filmed with a high-angle shot, which makes him appear smaller. Instead, he is filmed from an over-the-shoulder shot at shoulder level, making him seem like a challenging knight and equal to the king of the throne, holding his princess – his prize.

Contrast by lighting

Contrast by lighting is about how light and shadow interact in a frame. Think of it as a spectrum from bright white to pitch black, with every shade affecting how viewers experience a scene. This is not unique to film but is also very effective in photography and painting.

Artists such as Rembrandt are famous for using contrast in their artwork. Filmmakers and videographers often mimic his “Rembrandt lighting,” where one side of the face is lit, and the other is in shadow (with a small triangle of light under the eye):

This distinctive high-contrast technique and style eventually became known as chiaroscuro, meaning the interplay between “clear, bright” and “dark, obscure.”

By manipulating contrast, you can direct where you want the audience to look, set the emotional tone of a scene, and add depth to the scene. It’s not just about making things look good – it’s about making you feel something specific.

The two main approaches to contrast are achieved through specific lighting techniques:

High-contrast compositions

You can create a high-contrast scene by using low-key lighting or placing one subject in the light and the other in the shadows. This technique dominates film noir, where the high-contrast look shows the moral duality of the characters and anti-heroes.

It’s also popular in horror and thrillers because it creates tension and mystery: “Who is lurking in the shadows?”

Low-contrast compositions

Low contrast compositions are often created using high-key lighting or a desaturated color profile, minimizing the difference between lights and darks. This is even achievable in black-and-white movies.

Barbie (2023) is an excellent example of a movie that uses a low-contrast look to emphasize the shallow and artificial Barbie world. Likewise, most modern sitcoms, like Modern Family or The Office, use this technique to create a neutral, comfortable viewing experience that keeps the focus on the comedy rather than creating a dramatic atmosphere.

Contrast by Color

Similar to light and darkness, colors interact, and complementary color combinations can create contrast in a composition. Complementary colors are pairs of colors that, when combined, cancel each other out. In the color wheel, they are located directly opposite each other.

Two good complementary color examples are the teal-and-orange look and the red-and-green look.

Here’s a link to free LUTs, including the teal and orange lut.

Contrast by Size and Scale

Size relationships between elements create an immediate visual hierarchy. Larger objects naturally draw more attention than smaller ones, and scale differences can establish dominance or vulnerability between subjects; imagine Hulk battling an ordinary human.

In essence, it’s a form of juxtaposition, and how you place a big subject in relation to a small subject, and the camera angle you choose is important in conveying “who’s in charge.”

James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989) is a great example. In several sequences throughout the movie (like the one above), he uses the vastness and depth of the ocean to show how small and insignificant humans are in comparison. This is especially evident in the special edition (director’s cut from 1993), in the sequence with the massive wave:

A low-angle shot can emphasize a subject’s size, making it seem even more imposing.

Positive and Negative Space

Every frame in a movie has a height and width level determined by the aspect ratio. You must work within those boundaries; it’s the canvas you can fill. The question is, what do you want to fill it with and why?

An image or frame can be more or less dense. Density is the number of elements occupying an area of the frame. Dense areas—also known as positive space—draw attention, while sparse areas—or negative space—provide visual rest and are in contrast to negative space.

Positive and negative space can transform otherwise flat images into three-dimensional worlds, and you can use it to shape both composition and narrative.

Positive Space

Positive space contains a frame’s subjects and key elements (the areas of interest). It consists of the areas that actively tell the story or information.

It doesn’t have to be one or two subjects, but it can consist of many points of interest that draw you in and make your eyes wander across the screen.

Director Peter Greenaway is a good example of a director who uses positive space extensively and always has a lot going on in his compositions—from the foreground to minute details in the background. Here’s a glimpse of his Renaissance and Neo-baroque-inspired style:

Filling the Frame

When you fill the frame, your subject/object takes up the whole space, so there’s no negative space left:

Extreme close-up shots, such as those shot with long focal lengths or macro lenses, are common ways to fill the frame.

Negative Space

Negative space is the empty area around and between subjects. It can create emphasis, suggest isolation, or provide visual breathing room. Negative space can also give important elements room to breathe or create emotional distance between subjects.

It’s worth stressing that negative space shouldn’t be understood as “there’s nothing there.” It doesn’t mean that it’s not important. Like the silence between notes in music, the negative space carries immense information and weight. Negative space (the “nothing”) can be pretty imposing.

Depth

Traditional movies are a two-dimensional medium. Even 3D films, such as Gaspar Noe’s Love (2015), and emerging technologies, such as Augmented Reality, only create the illusion of three dimensions. They are still viewed on 2D screens. Because of this, filmmakers have become masters of using various techniques to create the illusion of depth on the silver screen.

The most basic technique is placing elements in the foreground, middle ground, and background.

Foreground Elements

Foreground elements often exist between the camera and the main subject. They add depth, frame subjects, or provide contextual information about the scene:

However, sometimes the main subject is placed in the foreground:

In 1st-person point of view shots, the foreground consists of elements the subject sees:

Middle Ground

Middle ground typically contains the main subject or action. It serves as the primary plane of focus and narrative information.

Background

Background elements provide context, the setting, and depth. They can help shape the mood, set the tone, add information (fx subtext, symbolism, or easter eggs), or contrast with foreground subjects.

Look at this example from The Departed (2006), which uses the letter X as a forewarning of death, much like the oranges in The Godfather trilogy:

But other times, the protagonist or one of the main characters is placed in the background:

In other words, the background is as important as the middle ground and foreground.

Deep Focus

Deep focus keeps all planes sharp from foreground to background. This allows for deep space composition, with simultaneous action across multiple depths. Consequently, all planes on the Z-axis are equally important, and the viewers must choose where to look.

Deep space composition is also a good technique to show relationships between actions at different distances.

Citizen Kane is the movie to know in this regard because it pioneered deep focus techniques:

Deep focus is usually achieved by shooting with a narrow aperture. Knowledge of hyperfocal distance is also a good idea, especially for landscape scenes.

Shallow Focus

Shallow focus isolates subjects by blurring other planes. This technique directs attention and can suggest a character’s mental state or perspective.

To create a shallow depth of field, you usually shoot with a wide-open aperture on a fast lens.

Leading Lines

A line leads to a point. Leading lines lead to a point of focus. Leading lines can be natural or artificial, i.e., part of the natural environment or artificially created, like architecture in a city or CGI environments created on a sound stage or cyclorama.

Natural Lines

Natural lines come from landscape features like rivers, mountains, winding rivers, and horizons. These lines can guide attention or create natural frames. Look for natural lines in your environment to guide viewers through your composition.

Again, Lawrence of Arabia (1962) is a good example:

Architectural Lines

Architectural lines come from buildings, streets, and human-made structures. They create strong geometric patterns and perspectives.

The Third Man (1949) is a strong example of how architecture—from buildings to staircases—can direct our eyes.

Here’s another example:

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Within these natural or artificial settings are five types of leading lines:

Each type of leading line can be blatant or subtle.

Using leading lines is an excellent way to guide the viewer’s eyes along your composition’s X, Y, and Z axes.

Horizontal Lines

Horizontal leading lines run across the composition on the X-axis, directing our eyes to look from left to right – or vice versa – like in this example from Lawrence of Arabia (1962):

Vertical Lines

Vertical leading lines make us look up or down along the composition’s Y-axis. Vertical lines often communicate power (fx, corporate, or religious) or hierarchy.

Diagonal Lines

Diagonal leading lines stretch across the frame and often have a vanishing point along the Z axis, either in or outside the frame. Here’s an example from Superman (1978):

Converging Lines

Converging leading lines meet at vanishing points (one or more), creating depth through perspective. These lines naturally draw the eye toward their meeting point.

Stanley Kubrick was a master of converging leading lines and used symmetry, center framing, and leading lines to draw us into the composition of his films:

Curved Lines

Curved leading lines suggest journey and fluidity. They’re often found in natural environments, such as a curved river or a snake in the foreground, but objects such as curved windows or mirrors can also create leading lines.

Curved lines can lead in all directions – and even create depth along the Z axis.

Curved lines can be disconnected or connected and take the shape of circles, ovals, or other fluid shapes.

Shape and Form

As humans, we tend to recognize shapes, patterns and faces in the world around us. It’s a simple survival mechanism, really. We organize the world to better sort the important from the unimportant information in our brains.

Natural and artificial shapes

Similar to leading lines, shapes can be produced naturally or artificially. Natural elements like trees, rock formations, or weather patterns can create organic frames within the main frame.

Buildings, doorways, windows, and other constructed elements create geometric solid frames. These frames often symbolize civilization, constraint, or observation.

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The fundamental shapes in composition – triangles, circles, and squares/rectangles – each bring distinct qualities to the frame. You can use these to create frames within the overall frame, making your composition much more enticing.

Triangles

Triangular arrangements suggest hierarchy, stability, or conflict. They create natural visual movement from base to apex.

Triangular compositions establish a relationship between three elements or create stable, classical compositions. A good example is the Mexican stand-off from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly:

Circles

Circular compositions suggest unity, completion, or entrapment. They can create harmony or emphasize isolation:

See an Overview of Wes Anderson’s Best Movies.

Squares and Rectangles

Rectangles represent stability, structure, order, organization, security, and trust. However, they may imply conformity and rigidity and symbolize containment and boundaries. The symmetry of squares and rectangles is also good when you want to create a balanced, harmonic composition:

Frame Within Frame

Creating secondary frames from elements within the scene is a common way to add depth and direct our attention to a particular subject. Common ways to do this are using bent arms or legs to create triangles and doors, windows, or mirrors to create squares or circles.

Textures

Movies are an audiovisual medium. Since we cannot tactilely feel or smell them, we have to trigger those senses in other ways. Textures are a visual composition technique for achieving this.

Texture adds a tactile quality to visual compositions. The physical or visual texture on surfaces adds detail and can suggest age, quality, or environmental conditions.

Textures’ physical attributes can evoke sensory memories and work best if we’ve experienced the same (or something similar) as the fictional characters, i.e., if we have the same referential index to get a bit academic.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet is a master of using texture to provide tactile information. Consider these four frames from Amelié (2001):

Patterns

Like patterns in music, visual patterns can also create rhythm through repetition, guiding attention, suggesting themes (such as entrapment, order, or monotony), and creating visual rhythm.

Repeating similar elements creates visual rhythm and can suggest order, monotony, or mechanical precision.

Pattern Breaking

The interruption of an established pattern creates an immediate focal point. This technique can highlight individuality or disruption of order. Breaking patterns in your compositions can create visual metaphors for rebellion, individuality, or change.

Color

Color and light are fundamental in guiding our attention, and this is an extensive field of study. Colors affect us psychologically, emotionally, and physically.

Also, colors have an inherent tone, symbolically loaded and somewhat culturally determined, that is well-established in film, photography, and painting. For example:

• Pink often symbolizes feminity, innocence, or beauty
• Red often symbolizes passion (red roses) or danger (blood)
• Orange often symbolizes warmth (hot summer days), friendship, or youth
• Yellow often symbolizes madness, sickness, or obsessiveness
• Green often symbolizes nature, corruption, or immaturity
• Blue often symbolizes cold, isolation, or melancholy
• Purple often symbolizes the mystical, fantasy, ethereal, or even eroticism.

Color schemes and palettes

When you begin mixing these colors, things become really interesting. Color relationships in composition can create harmony or tension; their interplay shapes how we understand and feel about scenes.

Then, when you’ve established the colors in a scene, the next step is to examine their saturation (intensity), brightness, and contrast, which add further depth to their meaning.

The first step to understanding color relationships in film is to get familiar with the color wheel:

Monochromatic colors

Monochromatic color schemes use variations in lightness and saturation of a single color to create a cohesive and harmonious look.

The green tint of The Matrix trilogy is a good example. It gives the virtual world created by the machines a cohesive and controlled look as if they want humans to lull them to sleep. It reminds us of a forest’s green, pleasing, soft look. But it’s a corruption of our minds.

Analogous Colors

Analogous colors sit next to each other on the color wheel. Often, one of the colors dominates (the primary color), a second color is a supporting color, and the third accentuates elements in the composition. They create harmony and unity within scenes and are often found in nature.

Complementary Colors

Complementary colors sit opposite each other on the color wheel. Their contrast creates visual energy and draws attention. When you want elements to pop in your frame, try placing complementary colors next to each other:

Triadic Colors

Triadic color schemes use three colors equally spaced around the color wheel. This creates balanced but vibrant compositions with high visual interest.

Balance and Symmetry

Most artists strive to achieve balance in any piece of art, whether it’s the producer adjusting the volume of each instrument music mix, an abstract painter striving to get a painting to be harmonious and not “tilt” to a side, or a cinematographer or director trying to balance the composition in a film. But you can also intentionally upset the balance.

In film, balance creates stability or tension through the distribution of visual elements, which can be achieved through various arrangements. Each type creates different psychological and emotional effects.

Symmetrical Balance

Symmetrical compositions mirror elements across a central axis. This creates formal, stable, and sometimes unsettling images.

Asymmetrical Balance

Asymmetrical balance distributes different elements to create equilibrium without mirroring. That’s a fancy way to say that filmmakers use elements of unequal weight opposite each other to balance a composition. This creates more dynamic, natural-feeling compositions.

Radial Balance

Radial balance arranges elements around a central point, creating movement or focus through circular composition.

Spiral Composition

The golden spiral, derived from the golden ratio, creates natural-feeling movement through frames. Elements placed along this spiral smoothly guide our attention.

Camera Angles

Camera position relative to subjects affects the viewer’s relationship to scenes. Different angles create different psychological effects.

Standard camera positions each bring specific psychological and emotional impacts to scenes.

Neutral Angles

Neutral angle shots are shots where the camera is parallel to the subject. They place viewers on equal footing with subjects.

Eye-level shots are a good example. Eye-level shots feel neutral and observational. Use eye level when you want viewers to feel like neutral observers.

High Angles

High angles (from subtle to perpendicular) place cameras above subjects, making them appear smaller or vulnerable. This position can suggest powerlessness or observation.

Low Angles

Low angles frame subjects from below, making them appear larger or more powerful. They can suggest dominance, heroism, or threat.

Dutch Angles

Dutch angles tilt the camera off its horizontal axis, creating unease, disorientation, or psychological tension. When your story calls for psychological tension or instability, consider tilting your frame.

Tips for Analyzing Visual Composition

Whether you’re analyzing or directing a movie, ask yourself who is doing something in the scene, what they’re doing, when/where they’re doing it, why they’re doing it, and how—the who and the what should guide every other decision.

Who or what is the most important thing? For example, is it a character or object that’s the most important thing? And are multiple characters/objects calling for a visual hierarchy of multiple focal points? And what are they doing? Is it a monologue, dialogue, or action?

Understanding these elements makes it easier to make informed choices about who or what should be in focus, how the setting and context they’re doing it in should look in terms of colors and light, how to guide and control viewers’ attention regarding elements such as symmetry and leading lines, and, ultimately, how to create images loaded with the meaning and subtext you want to convey.

Closing Thoughts

Composition in film combines technical skill with artistic vision. While rules and techniques provide a foundation, effective composition serves story and emotion. Your story should always guide your compositional choices, not vice versa.

Each film requires its own compositional approach. What works in Kubrick’s symmetrical frames might not serve Anderson’s whimsy or Malick’s naturalism.

Keep learning from other filmmakers, and develop your eye. Study compositions you admire, understand why they work, and then adapt these lessons to your vision. And don’t limit yourself to movies; nature, architecture, paintings, and photography are well worth studying.

Up Next: Best Films to Watch to learn Filmmaking on your own.