BLOCKING: STRUZAN FLOATING HEADS PART 1

The movie posters trope of “Large characters in the sky with lone figure or small scene at the bottom of the poster” is so common I thought it would be interesting to see how Struzan works within this trope. Interestingly, I found that with the exception of a few posters, he usually avoids this. So I thought it would be fun to dig deeper to see a few methods Struzan does to put his spin on this idea.

METHOD 1: THE CIRCLE

The first method Struzan uses is to avoid directly horizontally bisecting the composition by arranging the elements in a circle. This also helps to avoid leaving the bottom of the composition smaller and imbalanced compared to the heavy top:

Examples from Struzan:

METHOD 2: FULL BISECT

The next method Struzan uses is again to avoid giving the image a full horizontal bisect… by doing a vertical bisect. This involves linking the top of the image to the bottom of the image - while still keeping the large floating heads:

Examples from Struzan:

METHOD 3: partial bisect

The next method involves giving a little “breather” between the floating heads by inserting a small element between each head:

Examples from Struzan: