ae-composition

Composition

Most motion-design work that looks amateur is not badly animated. It is badly staged: small elements floating in the middle of an empty frame, everything the same size, every beat composed identically. Animation cannot fix that — it just moves the problem around.

This is the layer under ae-motion-principles: what the frame looks like when nothing is moving.

The three faults that make work look generic

Check every beat against these before animating it.

1. No focal point. Something must be the thing you look at. The dominant element should cover roughly 25–60% of the frame and sit where the eye lands first. If the biggest thing on screen is 10% of the frame, there is no subject — only furniture.

2. No scale contrast. Hierarchy is size first, colour second, motion third. The point of the beat wants to be 3–6× the size of its supporting elements. Two elements within 1.5× of each other read as a list, not a statement.

3. The frame is unused. A 1080×1920 frame with everything in a band between 25% and 70% of its height wastes half the picture, and in a feed the empty bottom is where the platform's UI sits anyway. Either fill the frame or compose the emptiness deliberately — a big element with air around it is a composition; a small one is a gap.

ae_proof measures all three (frame-unused, no-focal-point, no-scale-contrast), so you do not have to guess whether a beat is under-staged. For a scene comp that gets its background from a master, pass {"staging": true} — see ae-motion-proof.

Staging a beat

1. Say the beat in one sentence. "Enquiries come back with names and

numbers." Whatever is the subject of that sentence is the dominant element.

1. Give it size. Make it big before making it interesting. A card at 30%

of the frame with a headline over it beats the same card at 12% with three supporting details.

1. Add one supporting element, not four. A label, a number, a rule.

Everything else is noise at this scale.

1. Place it off centre. Dead-centre everything is the default that makes

a film look like a slideshow. Offset the subject and balance it with the type block or with empty space.

1. Let something bleed. An element that runs off an edge tells the eye

the world continues past the frame. One bleed per beat is usually enough.

1. Then animate it (ae-motion-principles).

Numbers that hold up

For a 1080×1920 vertical frame (scale by the short side for other formats):

The single most common fix in practice: take whatever is on screen and double it in size. Work that looks under-designed is usually work that was composed at desktop scale and never checked at phone scale.

Varying between beats

A film where every beat is composed the same way is a slide deck with transitions. Move the eye:

ae_proof's same-staging check measures this: if every resting composition in a film is centred on the same line, it says so.

Change one thing between neighbouring beats — position, scale or crop — not all three, or the film stops feeling like one piece.

Depth, light and texture

Flat fills read as a wireframe. Three cheap things separate a film from a mockup, in the order they pay off:

1. A background that is not one flat colour. A soft gradient, a very

large blurred shape in a second brand tint, or a slow vertical ramp. Blur on an adjustment layer above the shapes (ae-effects).

1. Light. A vignette that darkens the corners by 8–15%, and a lift where

the subject sits. The eye goes to the brightest place — put it where the subject is.

1. Grain. 1–2% noise over everything, on one adjustment layer. It costs

nothing, hides banding, and is most of what makes a flat graphic look filmed rather than exported.

Then depth: two or three planes at different Z with a slow camera push give parallax that no amount of easing can imitate (ae-camera-3d).

Cropping and bleeding

• Crop into things. A card shown whole is an object; a card cropped by

the frame is a place. Close-ups are where product films get energy.

• Bleed off one edge, not all four, unless the element is a background.
• Keep the crop consistent within a scene. If the subject bleeds left on

one beat, do not move it to bleed right on the next without a reason.

Formats

A layout is not a size. A variant starts as a duplicate of the master (ae-deliver), so it keeps the assets and the timing, and then gets restaged:

• 9:16 — stack what was side by side; raise type relative to width; keep

the beat between 12% and 80% of the height.

• 1:1 — the tightest crop. Usually one element and one line of type.
• 16:9 — horizontal air is cheap; use it for pairs and comparisons.

Re-proof every variant. A layout that passes in 16:9 routinely shows up as clipped, safe-area or frame-unused in 9:16.

Check it

1. ae_render_frame at each beat's resting moment, at downscale: 1.
2. Ask of each frame: what is the subject, and is it the biggest thing here?
3. ae_proof {"comp": …, "staging": true} for the three faults and for

same-staging across the film (ae-motion-proof).

1. Squint at the contact sheet. If every tile looks the same, the film has

one composition and needs five.