Leading Lines

Something in the scene points, and the eye follows it before anybody decides to. A road, a handrail, a shadow across a floor, a row of lights.

The line also builds depth for free. A line running away from the camera describes the distance between the lens and the subject, so a flat frame gains a third dimension without any change of lens.

Pick the line from what is already in the scene and put the camera where it runs toward the subject. Moving the camera a metre changes where the line points, which is usually faster than moving anything else.

Name where the lines come from. A road leads slowly and steadily. A rail leads hard and straight. A shadow leads softly and can be broken by anything it falls across.

Lines from the bottom corners of the frame are the strongest, because they start where the eye already is. Lines entering from the top read as pressure coming down instead.

Use it when the subject is small in the frame, when a scene is busy, or when the shot has to hand off attention to a particular place in it.

Skip it when the lines point somewhere you do not want. A strong line that runs past the subject and out of frame takes the audience with it.

One point perspective is the strict case where every parallel line converges on a single point. Leading lines can come from one direction only, and they do not have to meet anywhere.

Central framing puts the meeting point in the middle of the frame. Leading lines can lead to a subject on a third, at an edge, or anywhere else.

The frame comes back with lines that go nowhere, usually because the prompt named the effect and not the source. Say what the line is made of and where it starts.

The second failure is a line that stops short. Say the lines run all the way to the subject, or a model will lay them across the foreground and drop them.