Composition Exercise

We were given a little test the other day in our directing class. The goal was to create a single frame on paper that fore-shadowed a young boys death in the film Rat-catcher. All we had to help us was the short passage taken from the script.

The scene was of a boy playing with a net curtain at home, his mum stops him and clips him round the head for being silly. Latter in the film the boy drowns in a canal. So in the single frame we had to come up with a image that fore-shadowed this event.

We immediately started thinking of things that were not part of the script, started adding various elements unnecessarily to symbolise drowning. This of course was breaking the rules. We had to come up with a shot that contained only four elements; the boy, a windows, a net curtain and his mum.

Our next thought was to use the net curtain as a way of representing water, we thought by wrapping the boy in the curtain, he's struggling to get out of it, it could fore-shadow a future struggle but this time he gets lucky because his mum's there to pull him out of it. We placed the boy in a mid close up and in the centre of the screen to represent his weakness.

It was really all we could think of.

Our biggest mistake was trying to make the net curtain represent water and to try and link what was happening in his home to the event further in the film. When we saw the real film scene it was so simple but so brilliant. The boy was wrapping himself in the curtain effectively becoming a mummy, the window, which all of us hadn't even thought about, was shaped like a cross. You could hit pause at anytime during that scene and you would have seen the image of boy soon to die. It was so obvious, so easy and that's what makes it such a brilliant shot.

We were thinking along the right lines but we were perhaps trying to join dots that weren't there, if we had just taken a step back and analysed each element properly we could have perhaps thought of something closer to the original scene. As it was we got close but approached it from the wrong angle.