#MediaMonday: What is Artificial Framing?
This week, my students have been hard at work on the 60 Second HorrorFest entries. After the prompt dropped on social media Sept 30th, they've been scrambling to form teams and develop lighting designs.
As you probably know, the required prop in this film is a box. That sent me to pondering how I might present that to affiliates as a lesson plan. Instead of teaching you how to include a box in a film, I instead chose to focus on how to use boxes inside of framing in a film.
Therefore, the topic of today's lesson plan is Artificial Framing in Film.
Artificial framing is boxing in a subject inside of the frame of your camera with the setting, object or people. It could also be called "putting a box within a box". With the prop of "a box" this could make for some super cool shots.
To teach this, here is a suggested lesson:
Ask the students where they have seen this type of shot before.
Talk about the effect created with this shot and how they could use it themselves.
For practice: Ask them to take 20-30 minutes and go shoot 5-10 photos with their phones that use artificial framing. These photos should keep a person as their subject.
Drop all the photos on a GoogleDoc and share them with you.
Look at the photos together and discuss how they worked.
Finally, encourage the students to find reasons and ways to use this technique in their own filmmaking.
Artificial Framing is awesome and is used all over the place. You'll start seeing this everywhere one you start looking for it.