Creating Depth with Foreground Middleground Background

Why do some films feel immersive, pulling you directly into their world, while others feel distant or artificial? Often, the secret lies in the masterful use of depth. A flat image, where everything seems to exist on a single plane, can feel lifeless, lacking the dimensionality we experience in the real world. Conversely, an image rich with layers — distinct foreground, middleground, and background elements — feels alive, dynamic, and infinitely more engaging.

Depth creates emotional and psychological impact. It mirrors how we perceive reality — layered, complex, and constantly shifting. Leveraging a sense of depth within the two-dimensional frame is fundamental to cinematic storytelling. It roots the audience in the narrative, guides their eye, reveals character psychology, and enhances the emotional impact of a scene. From the meticulously composed frames of Akira Kurosawa to the dynamic staging of Steven Spielberg, understanding and utilizing depth is key to crafting truly cinematic images.   

This article explores the concept of DEPTH in filmmaking: what it is, the techniques used to create it, and how filmmakers leverage it across different narrative contexts — from composition and action to creating connection, scale, and even deliberate flatness.

WHAT IS DEPTH?  

At its core, depth in filmmaking refers to creating a sense of three-dimensionality within the flat, two-dimensional frame. It’s spatial storytelling. Instead of presenting the world as a single plane, filmmakers utilize foreground, middleground, and background elements to construct layers.   

FOREGROUND	Objects or subjects closest to the camera. These elements often frame the action or add context.
MIDDLEGROUND	Typically where the main subject or primary action is located.
BACKGROUND	The elements furthest from the camera, providing context, scale, and atmosphere.

By consciously arranging elements across these planes, filmmakers transform the screen from a flat surface into a window onto a believable, immersive world. This spatial arrangement isn’t just aesthetic. It guides the viewer’s eye and contributes significantly to the story being told.

HOW TO CREATE DEPTH?  

Now that we understand what depth is — spatial storytelling through layers — how do filmmakers actively manufacture that feeling? It involves more than just placing objects near and far. Cinematographers and directors deploy a versatile toolkit of specific techniques designed precisely to enhance the perception of three-dimensionality, guide the audience’s eye, and serve the narrative. 

Here are some of the fundamental methods used to create depth…

DEEP FOCUS

This technique, famously mastered by cinematographers like Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane), keeps multiple planes of the image (foreground, middleground, and background) in sharp focus simultaneously. This allows the audience’s eye to roam the frame, discovering details and relationships between elements across different layers of depth. It requires significant light and specific lens choices (often wider lenses stopped down).   

LIGHTING FOR SEPARATION

Light and shadow are crucial for sculpting depth. Backlighting or rim lighting helps separate subjects from their background, giving them definition and preventing them from blending into the darkness. Carefully placed shadows can create distinct planes within the frame, suggesting distance and volume even in monochrome. The chiaroscuro effect, with its high contrast, naturally enhances the sense of depth.   

ATMOSPHERIC PERSPECTIVE

Introducing elements like fog, haze, smoke, rain, or dust creates visible layers in the air. These atmospheric effects cause objects further away to appear less sharp, lower in contrast, and potentially shifted in color (often cooler), mimicking how we perceive distance in the real world and adding a tangible sense of three-dimensionality. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner masterfully uses smoke and haze for this effect.   

COLOR AND TEXTURE

Color theory plays a role, too. Generally, warmer colors (reds, oranges, yellows) tend to visually advance, while cooler colors (blues, greens) tend to recede. Filmmakers can use this to subtly enhance depth. Similarly, placing detailed textures in the foreground against smoother backgrounds (or vice versa) can create a sense of separation between layers. Wong Kar-wai’s films, like In the Mood for Love, often use rich textures and layered colors within confined spaces to create depth.   

DEEP COMPOSITION: GUIDING THE EYE THROUGH SPACE

Creating effective depth extends beyond placing objects at different distances. In fact, it’s about composing the frame to guide the viewer’s eye through that space. Masters like Akira Kurosawa and Orson Welles meticulously constructed their deep frames.

LEADING LINES

Using natural or architectural lines (roads, paths, hallways, converging lines of perspective) to draw the viewer’s eye from the foreground deep into the background creates a powerful sense of depth and direction.

FRAME WITHIN A FRAME

Utilizing foreground elements like doorways, windows, arches, or even characters positioned strategically can create a frame around the middleground or background action. This technique adds distinct layers and focuses attention on the subject within the inner frame. Kurosawa’s High and Low brilliantly uses framing and depth to comment on social strata. Welles’ Citizen Kane and The Trial are exceptional examples in using deep focus and architectural framing to create complex, layered compositions.

Crucially, deep composition isn’t about cluttering the frame. It’s about using layers intentionally to direct attention and create meaning across multiple planes of action simultaneously.

DEEP ACTION: LAYERS OF CHAOS AND URGENCY

Layering action across foreground, middleground, and background adds immense realism, scale, and urgency to dynamic scenes. Francis Ford Coppola, working with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro on Apocalypse Now, frequently places the viewer amidst chaos. We might see intense action in the foreground, the main narrative beat in the middleground, while background elements like smoke, explosions, or running extras add layers of environmental detail and keep the world feeling alive and dangerous. 

Similarly, Steven Spielberg’s depiction of the Normandy landing in Saving Private Ryan uses layers of action to create an overwhelming sense of immersive, terrifying chaos. This technique prevents action from feeling staged or isolated, embedding it within a larger, dynamic world.

DEEP STAGING: CHARACTER PLACEMENT AS NARRATIVE

Where characters stand and move within a layered frame is fundamental to visual storytelling. Deep staging refers to arranging actors across multiple planes of depth, allowing their positions and movements relative to each other and the environment to convey meaning.   

Think of Steven Spielberg’s signature elaborate single takes (“oners”). In films like Munich or War Horse, characters often move through deeply layered environments. As they move from background to foreground or vice versa, their relationship to the space and other characters changes, often signifying shifts in power, emotional state, or narrative focus. 

Placing a character deep in the background can emphasize their isolation or insignificance, while bringing them close to the foreground can create intimacy or confrontation. Todd Field’s Tár uses deep staging within expansive, sometimes cold architectural spaces to reflect the protagonist’s power, isolation, and psychological state. A character’s position in depth is rarely accidental. It tells us something about how they feel and relate to the world.

DEPTH TO CREATE CONNECTION

Depth isn’t always about vastness. It can also create profound, sometimes unsettling, intimacy. Martin Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Chapman achieve this masterfully in Taxi Driver. They don’t just show us Travis Bickle’s (Robert De Niro) New York. They strap us into his cab.

The deep focus often keeps both Bickle in the foreground (inside the cab) and the gritty city streets (outside the windows) simultaneously sharp. Layers of urban decay — neon signs, steam rising from vents, figures on the street — constantly seep into Bickle’s isolated world through the windows. 

We are confined with him, immersed in his physical space and, by extension, his increasingly disturbed perspective. The depth isn’t comfortable. It makes us feel complicit, unable to escape his worldview, no matter how disturbing it becomes. The frame forces a connection.

DEPTH TO CREATE SCALE

Conversely, depth is essential for conveying epic scale and grandeur. David Lean, working with cinematographer Freddie Young on Lawrence of Arabia, is the undisputed master of this. The vast, deep shots of the desert seem to swallow the characters whole, emphasizing their insignificance against the immense landscape. This isn’t just beautiful scenery. Lean uses depth as an existential statement about Lawrence’s journey, his ambition dwarfed by the vast, indifferent “blank canvas of the desert.”

But Lean also uses depth intricately even in less expansive shots. A composition might feature Lawrence in the foreground, another figure in the middleground, and riders approaching across the distant desert background. These multiple planes of visual interest add narrative layers, echoing themes of fractured identity, clashing cultures, or the weight of leadership. Depth becomes a storytelling device, each layer revealing a facet of the character or the conflict.

OBSTRUCTION: DEPTH THROUGH BLOCKING

Creating depth doesn’t always mean opening up space. Sometimes, it involves deliberately blocking or obscuring the view. Using foreground elements — a doorway, a windowpane (perhaps streaked with rain), a fence, foliage, another character’s shoulder — to partially hide the main subject creates a powerful sense of voyeurism, mystery, or emotional distance.

When we view a character through an obstruction, they can feel unreachable, isolated. This creates a complex tension: we are drawn to the character, but the frame keeps us partially out, enhancing feelings of longing or intrigue. Films like Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, or Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master frequently use foreground obstruction to create psychological complexity and emotional distance between the viewer and the characters.

FLAT BY DESIGN: THE PURPOSE OF FLATNESS

While depth often enhances realism and immersion, some filmmakers deliberately choose flatness for stylistic and thematic effect. Flattening the image — minimizing the distinction between foreground, middleground, and background — creates a more two-dimensional, presentational look.

Wes Anderson is the most famous proponent of this style. Films like Moonrise Kingdom and The Royal Tenenbaums often feature symmetrical compositions, characters presented parallel to the camera, and backgrounds that feel like stage backdrops or illustrations. This intentional flatness creates a storybook or dollhouse aesthetic. It reinforces themes of control, arrested development, and characters struggling with emotional expression, often creating a sense of charming artifice but also emotional distance. 

The flatness becomes part of the film’s unique language. Similarly, the highly stylized, tableau-like compositions of Swedish director Roy Andersson (Songs from the Second Floor, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence) use flatness to create a sense of absurdist melancholy and social commentary. Choosing flatness is just as deliberate a choice as creating depth.   

THE BOTTOM LINE: SEEING IN LAYERS

Depth is a fundamental element of cinematic language, transforming a flat screen into a three-dimensional world. It’s much more than creating visual interest. It’s a powerful tool for guiding the audience’s eye, establishing scale, conveying emotion, building atmosphere, and enriching the narrative. By understanding how to manipulate foreground, middleground, and background elements — through composition, focus, lighting, atmosphere, staging, and even deliberate obstruction or flatness — filmmakers can add layers of meaning and significantly enhance the impact of their stories.

Start thinking in layers. Observe how depth (or its absence) is used in the films you watch. How does it make you feel? How does it contribute to the story? For visual study, resources like ShotDeck are invaluable, allowing you to dissect frames from master filmmakers and analyze their use of depth plane by plane. Consciously incorporating depth into your own work is a crucial step toward crafting truly compelling and cinematic images.

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