Rule of Third and The Golden Rectangle

The Rule of Thirds is something that artists, directors, cinematographers, photographers and animators use to better compose a shot or art piece. It not so much a rule but more like guidelines than actual rules. Ha ha – that last part was taken from Pirates of the Caribbean. What the Rule of Thirds do for the composition is that helps make the piece more interesting and balanced. The idea is not to compose your subject or the object of interest in the direct center of the frame or canvas. Putting your objects in the center all the time in boring and ineffective. That's not to say for certain shots you can't center the object at all. Just not all the time. It's like 95% Rule of Third and 5% center frame... more or less. I'm not a full believer in the “rules are meant to be broken” idea. I do believe that rules are meant to bend. So like I said, not every shot should be based on the Rule of Thirds composition. There are however other ways to set up shots compositions, which we'll talk about later. But first more on the Rule of Thirds.

To create a Rule of Thirds composition is by breaking an image down into thirds both horizontally in three parts and vertically into three parts. So in the end you have a tic tac toe grid. Like the image bellow:

With this made, which would apply to any framing composition, the center of interests are clearly defined. This means that the horizontal, vertical lines the spaces above, below, to the left and to the right of those lines, and the intersecting lines are where you actors, subjects, or objects should lie on. Here are some examples:

There's a nice video on Youtube that explains this:

But that's not all, there are two other main composition guides. The Golden Rectangle and the Golden Triangles. These provide even more interest to your composition.

The Golden Rectangle which look like this:

The Golden Rectangle is traditionally how all art work (this includes painting, sculptures, architecture...etc) is composed and constructed. The Golden Rectangle or the Divine Rectangle has been around forever. It's in all of nature. I'll go more into the history and the function of the Golden Rectangle later in a drawing tutorial.

But as you can see the Golden Rectangle also creates a spiral than continues forever. But the composition is basically the image above. It is used to have the objects of interest follow the flow of this spiral or fit on the lines created by the Golden Rectangle. Like the image below:

The Golden Triangle follows the same idea as the Golden Rectangle. Which looks like this:

This helps with composition as much as the other two. This allows you to break from the horizontal and move to another way of viewing the world.

There's a fantastic book called Dream Worlds: Production Design for Animation by Hans Bacher

This book is wonderful. Not only does it have amazing artwork from some of the best Disney animated films, but Hans talks about how to layout and compose a shot. This book has a lot of great insight and information that is invaluable! Get it!!!

There's an unnecessary debate about the Rule of Thirds vs The Golden Rectangle vs The Golden Triangle. Some people argue one is better the others. Others say that the Rule of Thirds is old, lazy, cliché, and should be phased out. This argument is pointless and dumb. The composition you choose should be your choice and effective for your story. If you choose any of the three compositions or come up with your own, and it helps your work, THEN SO BE IT! You decide, but understand that you need to know how composition works, and how to be clear in your storytelling to make the right decision.

So why bother doing any of this. Well for many reasons, but one main reason, and a very important one, is that we naturally move our eyes around things we are looking at. We do not keep our eyes fixed on one spot the whole time. Even if you try to look and stare at single spot you can feel and see your eyes moving around. So knowing this, we can compose our framing to use the entire composition to our advantage and properly tell our story.