BLOCKING: STRUZAN GROUPING PART 1

This is a concept I first learned from Struzan in his Hellboy DVD: relationships to characters are showed in compsoitions through groupings. This is helpful especially for movies that are new concepts - the audience does not know the story and the characters, so they do not know the character’s relationships. Struzan simplifies the “who’s who” by grouping the characters:

HERO/VILLIAN CLUSTERS

Below in Hellboy, Struzan groups the heroes up top, and the villains are clustered in the bottom:

In Balto, the villains are grouped in the top left, Balto stands alone in the center, and the heroes/support characters are in the lower left. This gives a clear snapshot of the relationships of all of the new characters.

The same technique is used in Muppets Treasure Island below. The villains are in the top left, heroes in the bottom/center right. And Jim Hawkins connects the two clusters, literally.

LEFT AND RIGHT

To simplify this even more, Struzan sometimes adheres to a “Left = Bad, Right =Good” clustering for supporting characters. In Shawshank Redemption, the two villains are on screen left, and two supporting heroes are on screen right.

Same goes for all the examples below: