Showing Power

A couple ways to show power is to have powerful people and organizations centered in frame, higher than others and bigger than anything else. 

In this frame, from Children of Men, the government building dwarfs the car carrying Clive Owen. It's directly centered in frame, which makes it appear solid and powerful. Lines from the road lead directly to the building, guiding our eye to the building and emphasizing its importance.

 When a busload of citizens enter a government facility, it's clear to see who's in charge. The officer stands tall over everyone, directly in the center of frame. All perspective line lead to him.

With the statue, the massive room, the large dogs, centered frame and perspective lines, there's no doubt that the guy at the end of the hall is powerful (and egotistical).

In contrast, as Clive Owen's character is weakened to the point of death and things seem hopeless, he is placed to the far left and bottom of frame. By doing this, his power is reduced to nothing. The Negative Space overwhelms him and when the boat emerges from the fog it's more centered, as it's taken control.

The art direction for this space creates a massive clean room with straight bars on all the windows and simple colors. The sense from this, is it's large and powerful, but bleak and controlling. Bars are, of course, symbolic of jails, institution and security.

Opposite of that,  this  smaller space has many colours, straight lines are broken using books, plants, lights, etc. This helps give a comforting, lived-in look and feel.

Using Art Direction and Cinematography means the story never needs to specifically say which place is powerful, the viewer can feel it. Imagine if the government office was in the cozy room example! It would completely change the feeling of the story.

However, since we expect evil government offices to be in large cold buildings, putting them in direct contrast could be more powerful, if set up well!

Guiding the Eye with Match Cuts

Especially when shooting fast paced scenes, guiding the eye into the right area of the screen is quite important. If a shot is 15 frames long, and it's going to be shown on a 70 foot screen, the audience has to know where to look. They can't take the time to search for what's important. With planning it's possible to guide the viewers eye to control what they see and know what's important. Many people just shoot for the center to easily match up, but that can be less interesting to see. Here's a quick example from Aliens, to show what a Match Cut can look like;

Although the proceeding cut is just TV signal distortion, our eye looks at it immediately and in the next shot, we're drawn to the Marine's gun. Next, I'll show a sequence of shots as the ship lands on the planet's surface.

In these two shots our eye is drawn towards the top of the screen with the help of the HUD cross. Then we cut to the ship at the top of screen.

In the next shot, our eye is guided to the screen with the help of the angles of the Actor's faces and the fact that the screen is the brightest part of the shot. It's on the left of frame, and when we cut to the next shot, the important part of this set (where they'll land) is the bright area to the left of frame.

When we cut back inside the ship, Ripley is speaking on frame left and the Carter speaks at the end of the shot, so our eye is drawn towards screen right. We cut to the next shot that has the ship on frame right.

Throughout this sequence, the viewer knew where to look the entire time. Very well planned shooting, that doesn't distract the audience. However, if you want to increase the feeling of tension, or the character being lost, it may feel better to have the viewer search a bit in the frame.