Rules vs. Emotions: Which Is the Best Tool for Cinematographers? | No Film School

Whether you make music videos, commercials, feature films, or wedding videos, there is a high expectation put on you to create beautiful imagery. But, perhaps you didn't know how to do this right off the bat, so you set out to educate yourself. Maybe you went to film school. Maybe you attended a class or seminar. Maybe you sat in a quiet corner of a library and read book after book about framing and composition until you understood aesthetic conventions like the Rule of Thirds, the Golden Ratio, and center framing.

While these "rules" of composition are helpful and more often than not deliver on their promise to provide you with a decent-looking image, are they the best way to approach composing and framing shots? Is there something that maybe the classes, lectures, and books couldn't teach that would help us all create better, more dynamic and beautiful images? As he points out in this video, Sareesh Sudhakaran of wolfcrow seems to think so.

So, which is it? Should you be following the "rules" of composition or your heart? I'm sure the answer to that is "both."

Being told that there are set rules for composing an aesthetically pleasing image is like telling a painter they can only ever use primary colors to paint. Even though blue, green, and red are incredibly important (they essentially form the foundation of every other color), they are but a guidepost on the path to creating art.

Allowing there to be flexibility in art is important, regardless of which side of the fence you're on. If you like feeling your images when you create them, do it! If you like following a structured set of rules, do it! Just keep in mind that all of these rules, guidelines, conventions, and laws of composition are actually just suggestions. Sure, many times they work to make pretty pictures, but remember that you're not in the business of "making pretty pictures." You're in the business of telling stories, and sometimes you have to venture off of the beaten path to find the words to tell them.

Source: wolfcrow

composition framing

What's the Hype With 'Interstellar' Revisiting Cinemas After a Decade in 70mm IMAX?

Here's Why You Need to Revisit 'Interstellar' in 70mm IMAX

Celebrate the love and hope at the center of Nolan's space epic in the format it was meant to be seen.

If we know anything about Christopher Nolan, he likes to go big. Nolan started with smaller-scale stories (as many of us do) with early noir adjacent works like Following, Memento, and Insomnia, then started going and staying big with his illusionist drama The Prestige. Since then, the scale has been various degrees of massive, with the biggest scope in his time-and-space sprawling epic, Interstellar.

While Interstellarmight not be everyone's favorite Nolan outing, there's no denying it's an impressive feat of filmmaking and his most emotional—if watching Matthew McConaughey's Cooper desperately try to reach his family through quantum space-time doesn't make you cry at least a little bit, what's going on, dude?

With Interstellar'sIMAX release, it's a great time to shed some tears in a public setting in one of the most prestigious film formats around. As we mentioned in our film gauge piece, Nolan loves shooting on film and utilizes 65mm intentionally to provoke a tone of massive scale. In that regard, Interstellar was made for 70mm IMAX. That goes without saying, dawg. That being said, other factors make Interstellar a perfect movie to revisit in theaters while you can.

Let's break down the release further below.

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