Composition examples from "The Queen's Gambit"

bytescapes

LogLine Cinema on Facebook has a fascinating analysis of composition techniques used in the Netflix series "The Queen's Gambit". (Apologies for the Facebook link, but I wasn't able to find this on the 'real' web).

The techniques are standard photographic composition techniques (Rule of Thirds etc.) but seeing them illustrated this way, in the context of some pretty lovely cinematography, really shows how they work and how effective they can be. Note that not everyone commenting agrees with LogLine's analyses (particularly with respect to what they call "golden section"), so don't take this as gospel -- but these are still some interesting examples of both composition and lighting.

Sevrin

What I found weird is that they take a still from the series, and then put a watermark with their copyright on it. 

bytescapes

Sevrin said:

What I found weird is that they take a still from the series, and then put a watermark with their copyright on it. 

<sigh> It's one of the aspects of the web that I hate -- misappropriation and missing attributions.

I suppose they'd argue that they are copyrighting not the original but a 'derivative work' -- the screencap plus their explanatory annotation.

I was going to say that their use of screencaps would put them on questionable legal ground, but on reflection I think they could argue fair use. Their work is transformative, it's non-commercial, it's not a substantial part of the whole work (if you take the 'work' to be a complete episode of "The Queen's Gambit" then a single frame capture is probably not substantial) and the "effect on the work's value", if any, is small.

Still, in their position I think I'd want to either leave off the watermark or put it under a Creative Commons license.