The Master Guide / 09 Performance · Blocking and hands
Blocking
Decide who stands where before you write anyone's acting.
Decide who stands where before you write anyone's acting.
Start with where people are: who faces whom, how far apart in metres, which landmarks. Give real heights in centimetres whenever a frame holds two people or more. Use percentages of the frame only when they give you extra control.
The first frame is already occupied and moving.
One camera position and one framing for each speaker, kept for every line they say, all from the same side of the line. In a multi-shot dialogue, begin with a brief wide that sets out where everyone is, then go close. Whenever the camera crosses the room (shot and reverse shot, an orbit, a look back), attach a reverse-angle plate, a still of the room from the opposite side (see Photoreal anchors (Nano Banana Pro) → Location plates).
A FIXED GEOGRAPHY paragraph (sides, doors and directions) holds for the whole sequence.
Seated groups get clock-face seats ("the grandmother at twelve o'clock, the camera at six"), plus a BACKGROUND line in each shot (one line naming what each background person does; see Making it feel real → Every visible extra has a job).
More than three acting characters: a staging map or previz (a rough 3D move made first to fix the path; see Camera and lens → Exact paths), or separate generations. Staging maps and position images are made with GPT Image (decided; see Still prompts, storyboard frames and diagrams → Staging maps, position images, scale sketches).
Why: Higgsfield's team made a second plate of the same room facing the door, so that every shot knows which way it is looking. In another of their films, moving both parents to the far side of a dinner table made the emotional distance visible before anyone acted.