Every frame and every scene has to have an intention.
I just - I kind of see it that way. I find the higher angles down. I do - look, you can go back to the staircase shots in "Third Man" or the staircase in "La Dolce Vita." So I just find that visual construction in a frame.
For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation.
When you're making a film, you have an obligation to fill the frame with life.
I compose the frame literally with the camera. Unless it makes a story point.
Great images take you on a journey via a single photograph. The depth and layers pull your eye all over the frame, causing you to pick up interesting pieces along the way, ultimately coming to a climax.
The balance of the frame - the way an actor is relating to the space in the frame - is the most important factor in helping the audience feel what the character is thinking.
Sometimes we misunderstand what films can do. We just throw a whole book in there, with people just talking, talking, and talking. The picture can tell, the frame can tell.
My job as an editor is to gently prod the attention of the audience to look at various parts of the frame. And that - I do that by manipulating how and where I cut and what succession of images I work with.
I like the camera to be still and not very shaky and have everything happen within the frame.
You tend to compose things more in the middle of frame in 3-D than you would in a conventional frame. You can really see composition in 2-D but in 3-D your composition is much more complex. Everything has to be artificially enhanced. But you do gain something else with 3-D: you have a sense of space and heightened reality.
Coming from the world of animation, every single line counts; every single gesture counts. You put thought into every single one of those things and the way a frame is composed.
The editing of moving pictures is geared toward the single image. You'd have to edit things in new ways.
