Storyboard Imitation

Make sure you have watched the scene from my past post, then continue reading this one.

This is the storyboard for the first 6 shots of the scene you should have just watched. 

The first two shots on the storyboard are a continuous shot, but from beginning to end it was so different I drew it as two shots. This is an example of the 180 rule. There were no cuts to be made in the first shot, so they didn't have any problem with jump-cuts. I guess you can also say he used the rule of thirds in the first shot. The girl, Sara, starts out at the top of the staircase and right away she has your focus because her head is at the intersection of the top right corner boxes and then it stays there for the rest of the shot. 

In the next shot, he went across the 180 degree line, but while following the rule that you can have a character look past to something and create a new line. After creating the new line and showing us it exists, he moves onto the next shot, where he uses the 30% rule. That is, as Sara gets farther away in the previous shot, this shot brings her back up close to us. Then again in the next shot it's another 30% difference in size of the shots as we see even more of what’s going on—almost in layers. Sara then crosses the 180 line by looking back at something and running towards it. 

That’s the end of the storyboarding I did, but as the scene goes on it’s about the same as far as the rules go.

I think Cuaron did a good job at using all 3 rules during this scene. He mostly played with the 180 degree line and the 30% rule, but it worked in his favor and made sense to the viewer. Cuaron is a very visual director and that’s why I chose to analysis one of his films. He likes to play with the shots and what they look like.