When taking pictures or movies, you can only photograph what's visible in the aperture of your camera lens. If your subject's face falls out of the aperture frame, for instance, you wind up with a headless figure in your shot. Aperture framing is the art of deciding exactly what you want in the aperture at any given moment. Filmmakers use it to shape audience response to screen scenes.
Aperture Framing
- Aperture framing determines which part of a scene a movie audience sees. When characters sit talking in a crowded barroom, the image framed by the camera aperture may shut out the rest of the crowd and focus on the discussion or portray them surrounded by the bar's other patrons. The frame draws the viewers' focus to wherever the director and cinematographer want to call attention. It can follow someone running down a street or shift to emphasize a piece of paper with important information
Mood
- Writing in the film journal "POV," Jakob Isak Nielsen describes "Casablanca" as a film where the filmmakers use aperture framing to influence the mood. As the film progresses and the struggle against the Nazis becomes more serious, the frame shows us Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and other actors seen through small, enclosed windows, creating a sense of confinement and danger. In the silent vampire film "Nosferatu," the camera frames the image to include the vampire's coffin in several key shots.
Technical Tricks
- The angle of the camera frame influences viewers' impression of a scene. Shooting from a low angle can suggest the subject is looming over the setting, while shooting down implies smallness and vulnerability of the subject. Canting the frame so that right and left are not on the same level creates an impression of instability. Shooting a character so that she's almost out of the frame, rather than center stage, suggests loss or failure, as if the character failed to find a role in her own story.
Aspect Ratio
- One problem that emerges when cinemas or TV stations show older films comes from the fact that the aspect ratio -- the ratio between horizontal and vertical sides of the image -- has changed over time. Up until the 1950s, most film images were square or almost so. After Hollywood developed widescreen formats to compete with television, aperture frames became much wider. Before letterboxing became standard on television, TV showings invariably cropped wide-aperture frames to fit the screen, distorting the cinematographer's original intent.
