Planning Miscellany: The Disruption of Compositional Balance & One Point Perspective

In looking for inspiration for our short (as well as in more general terms), I am of the belief that looking outside of the genre we are working in can be just as beneficial as drawing from similar films.

The idea of the 'disruption of compositional balance' is when a shot draws attention to itself as a shot in a film, deliberately used to jar and unsettle the viewer. This effect can be created by extremely off-kilter shots, shots with an object unusually-focused on or unusually-framed, et cetera. One of my personal favourite directors, Stanley Kubrick, utilised a shot technique countlessly throughout his moviemaking career that creates a similar, if more subtle, feeling of uncertainty. Kubrick often eschewed the well-established 'rule-of-thirds' in favour of the 'one-point perspective': namely, framing shots so that the lines or 'vectors' of the shot converge to a central point. Many of these such shots have been aggregated in a single video -- see below:

As the video demonstrates, one-point perspective can create perplexingly tense shots when there is nothing physically 'wrong' or 'threatening' shown. The predominant theory as to why this sort of shot incites this effect in viewers is that the converging lines that this shot creates draw the eye into the centre of the frame, mirroring how we often see things in real life. The drawing of the eye into the centre of the frame and ignoring the outer edges can, at its most effective, be rather hypnotic. I am as of yet unsure how my group and I could incorporate this into our film noir short, but I will propose we use something like this in our next lesson; we have certainly discussed previously the disruption of compositional balance and how effectively it can build an unnerving atmosphere, and this technique might be beneficial.