Something I have been working on recently is improving the composition of the videos I create. Due to the fact I work on animation and live-action videos almost equally this has presented a unique learning opportunity, and also a challenge.

For animation, keeping scene composition in mind has to be maintained from the point of view of raw implementation. What I mean by that is that while there is a lot of creative freedom, since you really can create any composition you want, there is also a great difficulty in “forming” so-to-speak the different animation elements into a compositional whole that makes sense and also keeps to the style of the video, since everything must be done from scratch.

At the same time, my animation work is interspersed with filming for live-action interview videos, product demos, ect. This presents a need to almost “switch gears” when going on shoots to record these things. For example: a recent shoot of a product demo type video I worked on required a mix of different shots showing industrial workers being trained to complete a specific series of related tasks. With filming, composition is always a difficult beast to tackle since your options are limited to the space in which you are filming and you usually have a relatively short time to figure it out, an obvious fact which probably isn’t very noticeable until you’ve created a composition from scratch using your imagination. In that case, filming composition can be oddly frustrating! (i.e. I wish I could move that wall, why isn’t there a masking tool for the sun, ect.) In this case, everything worked well, but there were several times I wished the camera could be flown around the room we were in like it was a virtual world.

So there is always a need to put on different thinking caps and queue a new mindset that caters to the specific creative challenges of the current project. Some days, I wish it was easier, but in the end, watching a cool compositional idea really pan out and bring the video to life makes it all worth while. Usually… 🙂

By: John