The Importance Of Angles

Whilst filming multiple scenes it was clear that certain angles look better than others, because of this I was inspired to write this post. I thought it would be good to clarify why Joshua and I made the artistic choices we did. I'm going to be doing this primarily through examples.

This shot shows David's character getting ready for school and drying his hair. I planned this shot as I thought it was a good way of framing the scene as 'the rule of three' states that the subject of the shot should be on the left or right third of the screen rather than central. This angle also allows for no glare on the mirror which makes the movie look more professional as there's less production errors.

This secondary shot is what Joshua was filming when I took the previous photo and it was much lower in quality and standards. This is because this angle is unflattering as it shows David more centralised which makes him seem small rather than dominating the foreground and making him seem important. This makes the audience think less of him and essentially weak. This angle is also dimly lite compared to the previous shot, has a noticeable glare on the top right hand part of the wooden frame and shows the ripped wallpaper on the back wall. 

As you can see the position of the camera can heavily change the atmosphere of the short movie. I thoroughly believe we made the right creative decision by choosing the top recording. This is because it means Josh and I have prevented the issues we would've been struck with if we chose the second option as our clip used in our short films. I found that planning with Joshua where we'd place the camera beforehand rather than one of us just putting the tripod somewhere randomly very useful as it means we thought about how the resulting shot would look like and meant we needed to pay more attention to detail and think about how we wanted the shot to look at that point in time rather than following the storyboard exactly. This gave us the best possible creative look for our short which has met Joshua and my desires of what we wanted.