the devil really is in the details, though, and it's worth seeing what these details are!

Discussion for part 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6920151

Almost as wonderful as the level of appreciation for detail from the team that made the film is the level of work and detail that went into these two posts. I love the amount of evidence and the discussion of core concepts for cinematography -- this is the kind of stuff that I would wish to see if I were being taught in school.

Yup. A football player who dashes into space and makes a cross to another player who will be in open space is making tonnes of calculations in his head about moving bodies, acceleration, etc- but he isn't, either. He's internalized such thinking. Same for musicians, and same for artists of any kind.

Having studied drawing and painting in the last few years, composition is one of these things that I just didn't get. Then it suddenly clicked, mostly by switching to photography to experiment quickly with framing (crop it in photoshop), interesting leading lines and such.

It now feels totally natural, but the road to it was totally obscure for me until I just started taking tons of pictures. Interestingly, I now usually focus on composition / shape / focal points "consciously", planning it out, doing designs, while the more "technical" side of painting (mixing colors, brushstrokes, dark/light) is totally muscle memory.

I have made a lot of music, until it felt "part of myself", then tried out painting/drawing, which is now an integral part of my life and way of seeing the world. But my primary background and ultimately my "self-identity" is software. It is funny how art is pretty much the opposite in terms of process: I will consciously and "technically" work on the part that will affect the viewer/listener the most (composition, buildups/breakdowns in music, tension/relaxation, color/shape/form), and once a good "solution" is found the technical part of it kind of solves itself.

In software, I prefer working on system level things, threading designs, database / scaling, embedded systems. The architectural part of the system is very intuitive, I usually have an idea pop up in my head or while showering. They are often wrong, but I take care of that by doing a lot of miniature systems in their own branches and discard them when not good. However, the technical side of implementing that idea of a design is extremely demanding, and needs iterations and thinking and just plain focused work.

Nice attention to details! interesting post

Interesting note: Wes Anderson seems to get away with pretty much every established rule in the book of cinematography, and yet his films are generally beautiful to watch. Discuss.

Ditto leading lines.

It's down there at the end, that CG Boarding Page 14. Those Focal Points I just don't get them. Can't they just say make your frame look good and less boring by putting your object of interest off center, or did that rule just stick because it's easy to remember and easy to program and overlay.

As someone who's seen a lot of animated features, Fantastic Mr. Fox was fascinating. It made me realize just how much dogma I'd picked up about what animated features are "supposed" to be, pretty much entirely inherited from the choices Disney made in the 50s, which have been relentlessly copied by pretty much every animated feature ever since. FMF was from a very different place, and I found it incredibly strong because of that.

there's no rules about what looks good or not, obviously. the rule of third is also applied very liberally, you don't have to put focal points dead on thirds. It just is a nice rule that gives you quick results. Ultimatively, it is all up to you to decide what makes a good picture or not.

I personally find the rule of thirds very effective in leading to interesting and forceful compositions.

Practicing artist here.

There is one Rule of Art that supersedes any and all rules people may mention: All rules are actually guidelines. They're just things that people have noticed usually result in a more pleasing image; they're easy things to check for.

Another way to look at it is that they are markers of here there be dragons: when you know a rule, being aware that you're breaking it reminds you to make sure you're breaking it with flair, and to not break twenty other rules at the same time.

(You can even make pretty interesting work by choosing a rule and deliberately breaking it as much as you can - I've seen some very neat pieces that aggressively break the rule of "avoid tangents", for instance. Edit: even in the article at hand - halfway down the page, you'll find a sequence that is shot with everything dead center, because the moment calls for the static, deadening effect of that kind of composition.)

Or another way: all of these "rules" of art are like "patterns" and "code smells" are for programmers. Observations about broad patterns of design, notes on little stylistic tics that can add up to a big difference over the course of a large project.

tl;dr: it's a broad simplification of a complex problem into a short phrase, experts can and will go far beyond it.