Compositions and Design

I wanna start off my posts with something which most of the animators and artists take for granted. Much focus in art especially CG is on the tools and technique rather than the art side of it. True we are using a medium which is technical but the end result is the same as it was before i.e. ART. For a piece of animation to succeed there is good animation needed but more so we need good Compositions and Framing so that the point of the matter is not lost. (I am talking about animation as I am an animator; but the concept applies to all types of artists.) So let’s start!!!!

Compositions and designs – The Internal Framework -

There is much said about Compositions across the net, in books…. This is an attempt from my end to put what I have learnt over the years on document so that others who are maybe starting off or even been there for years add these things to their conscious side. Art for me is the amalgamation of not one but many viewpoints and that is what I am trying to provide here – viewpoints. Hope you like it!!!

Here goes……..

Compositions are a way of placing all the elements in the scenes in such a way so that the audience doesn’t miss the Business of the scene – by Business I mean whatever in that particular scene is going to move the story forward. Most of the times it is a character but however in some cases it can even be an object. (eg – Iron man mask). This is a very basic way of defining Compositions which explains that they are in a way used to build and communicate to the audience by visuals. However, this happens on a very subliminal level – it’s similar to the fact that people like a certain color but won’t be able to justify the fact as to why they like it. Our sense of perception is dependent on more so the subconscious than the conscious part of our mind as explained by Freud in a number of his studies. The conscious world is the world around us which we see with our eyes open whereas the subconscious is the world within us which in some ways affects the way we see the world. There is also the concept of the pre-conscious mind which includes those things of which we are aware, but where we are not paying attention. We can choose to pay attention to these and deliberately bring them into the conscious mind. Let’s not get too deep in to this as this is no pop-psychology class. The difference between an artist and the audience is the fact that the artist has the power to not only control what the audience sees but also indirectly he has the power to control how they feel about what they see. A good artist identifies cues and motifs by putting which he knows the audience may not see those but will surely experience them and would makes the particular situation more believable.

Compositions are the real key to say so much by not saying anything at all. So first off, how to say which compositions are good and which ones are bad? The simplest way to judge this would be believability and liking towards a subject or a frame. If you like something then most of the times it means that it is good and on the other hand if you don’t like an image or a frame then it must be bad. After all we are dealing with a medium which is mainly a subjective one. There are however some basic guides which a person needs to understand. Whenever I have read something on Compositions I have normally come across a few of the guides, namely - Rule of thirds, focal point, balance, Avoiding Symmetry, Negative space………