Creating top-down or overhead graphics is often helpful as I imagine how to lay out a scene. I use simple shapes to represent characters, the camera, and anything significant in my Staging, like buildings or trees.

Graphics like these are useful when ensuring that your shot sequence follows the 180-degree rule. This rule helps us keep our storytelling very clear for an audience. Once we establish two or more characters in a scene, we want to imagine a line on the ground connecting them. Your camera should rarely cross this line until everyone’s placements are changed or something happens to break the scene.

Instead, you should utilize any camera angle from within an imaginary semicircle. This ensures that Character A stays on stage left while Character B stays on stage right, even in over-the-shoulder shots. This helps an audience establish continuity, but if you’re trying to make an audience feel like the scene is chaotic, you may choose to break the 180-degree rule. In this example, the camera is never put on the left side of the table because it would cross the line between the child and the woman in this scene.

Composition

The image above illustrates the types of compositional techniques often utilized in artworks.

Rule of Thirds: The picture plane is divided into thirds, both horizontally and vertically. The areas of most visual interest are placed where the lines intersect.
Linear Perspective: A technique that creates the illusion of depth on a flat surface by depicting objects smaller as their distance from the viewer increases. To render deep three-dimensional space believably, all the lines in the composition are anchored by a vanishing point, where the lines of receding objects in the composition converge.
Golden Ratio: This mathematical principle states that elements arranged in a proportion of approximately 1:618 are believed to create aesthetically pleasing and harmonious designs. This proportion can be found in nature in shapes like spirals.
L Shaped: Where the arrangement of most prominent objects on the picture plane is placed in the shape of an L, typically a strong vertical object on the left anchors the composition.

Don’t forget that composition is an important aspect of Staging. Typically, we want a composition to feel balanced. We can accomplish this by ensuring the elements in our composition are roughly the same size and color and placed at the same eye level. However, too much balance can appear predictable, repetitive, and boring. You can still achieve balance in your compositions and keep them visually interesting if you consider aspects like color and size as a pool of allotted attention shared amongst all the objects in focus. There may also be times you intentionally want a shot to feel unbalanced; it can help to imply one character is more powerful or weaker than another.

Composition can also describe how the audience’s eyes are led through a single shot. Compare the top environments to the simplified breakdowns below them, which describe how these shots lead the eye around. Each shot here emphasizes a different section of the frame.

Rule of Thirds

The Rule of Thirds is one of the most commonly used rules of composition. If you divide your frame into thirds with horizontal and vertical lines, the crosshairs where these lines intersect are areas our eyes are naturally drawn toward. You will want to lay out compositions strategically, putting the most important action in these areas. Conversely, you may include subtleties or foreshadowing in your storytelling and hide these in areas that do not fall in the Rule of Thirds.

Rule of Thirds shown on a still from the animated film the Incredibles. — *Ratatouille* (2007)

The Golden Ratio

The Golden Ratio leads the eye through a specific spiral shape. This shape is appealing because we see it throughout the natural world—everything from seashells to leaves.

The Golden Ratio displayed on a series of different photos from nature.

The Golden Ratio displayed over a poster for the animated film Zootopia. — *Zootopia* (2016)