Days 4-5: Five Composition Rules, Ten Camera Angles, Five Camera Movements — and the Five Ways Movement Goes Wrong

Rule of thirds first, called the holy grail: subjects sit on the vertical lines with the eye on an intersection, with looking room in the direction they face and headspace that neither wastes the frame nor crops the head - though in a dramatic close-up it is better to crop hair than mouth. Symmetry is the licence to centre, because the eye finds it pleasing, and it can be manufactured as easily as adding a second desk lamp; it suits talking-head teaching because it removes distraction. Framing means level lines - 'having tilted frames can disorient your audience' unless the Dutch angle is deliberate - a filled frame with no dead space, and natural shapes used as a border. Then composing with purpose: know why before you break a rule, as in shrinking a subject in the frame to say loneliness. And clean the actual room before rolling.

Depth is the rule he singles out for 'that cinematic look', and the aim is to 'make your scene look as immersive and three dimensional as possible, not flat and boring'. Four techniques stack. Shoot at a low aperture so the background falls out of focus - a high aperture flattens the image and hands the viewer every distraction behind you. Physically separate subject from background, which increases the blur without changing a setting. Add a foreground element so the frame has three planes rather than two. And use leading lines - a road running to a sunset - to carry the eye to the subject.

There are 'hundreds and hundreds' of creative angles but ten staples do the work: wide, tight or close-up, extreme close-up, medium, long, high, low, over-the-shoulder, point of view and cutaway. Two of them carry meaning whether you intend it or not - shooting down on someone belittles them, shooting up empowers them. The cutaway breaks to a secondary subject to bridge a transition or move focus before returning. And the practical liberation: one camera is enough. Shoot an interview from two angles so the editor can cut out the ums invisibly, or re-shoot the same action from different angles as long as the subject repeats it consistently.

The primitives are five. Pan and tilt hold the camera still and move the angle, left-right and up-down. Dolly, truck and jib hold the angle and move the camera, forward-back, left-right and up-down. Everything named is built from those: push in draws the audience toward the subject, pull out shrinks them and can read as abandonment, parallax rotates slowly around a fixed subject while the background sweeps behind, and multi-dimensional moves combine two at once - pushing in while tilting up to hand the scene from one subject to another. Two practical notes: practise parallax on a wide lens, because zoomed-in shots expose every micro-shake, and shooting past a foreground element low to the ground exaggerates even a small move.

Both DJI walkthroughs teach the same logic, which transfers to any gimbal. Follow mode - the one he uses most - keeps the horizon level while letting pan and tilt track your body: 'the only thing it won't let you do is change the horizon.' Tilt Lock adds a locked tilt axis, leaving only pan free, which is exactly what an orbit or parallax shot wants. FPV frees every axis; Spin Shot adds joystick-driven roll on top. Sport mode, from a double-tap-and-hold on the trigger, makes the gimbal chase fast action at some cost in smoothness. Two trigger habits are worth memorising: double-tap recentres, and holding the trigger locks every axis so the camera stops following you at all. Active Track then removes the operator entirely, following a face or any object you box.

The list is short and every item is common. One: reaching for advanced movement before the basics - 'you need to walk before you learn how to run', and most professional footage is static or slow anyway. Two: dropping a whole shaky clip into the edit instead of trimming to the two seconds that were actually steady. Three: overusing your favourite move until it stops meaning anything; the standout movement has to stay rare to stay standout. Four: unmotivated movement, where the camera moves because the operator felt like moving rather than because the subject or the story asked for it. Five: leaning on Warp Stabilizer, which only works on footage that was already close to smooth - push it and you get the jello warp, and the honest answer is to reshoot or bin the shot.