STRUZAN BALANCE PART 6

Part of my work involves looking at shots I’m working on with fresh eyes in order to see things I’ve missed. This means flipping/flopping and rotating the images. I thought this would be a good idea to learn more from Struzan: flipping his work horizontally to learn more about his composition blocking. What’s I’ve learned is that he sometimes favors a “Left Side Lead-up to Right Side Wall” approach.

Below are examples from Struzan (the images on the left are originals, the images are the right are flipped).
What I noticed is that the left side of the composition often has the most negative space. Then the right side ends in a vertical “wall” of elements, seemingly stopping the viewer from going further right off the canvas and keeping their eye in the composition.

This also gives a balance of “left side sparse” to ease the viewer into the composition, and “right side crowded” to bring the elements to a climax.

EXCEPTIONS

Of course with Struzan, there are always exceptions: