serricoj:

Not my gifs, but here’s a thing I find interesting: this framing began as an SFX cheat.
TPTB needed to depict Cas’s supernaturally abrupt method of departing a scene; either they didn’t have the budget to actually show Cas winging away, or they preferred a more subtle and suggestive approach. (Having now had an on-camera angel teleport in ‘The Vessel’, I know the subtler suggestive approach is my preference.) What they decided on was the following sequence of shots:

1) Medium shot of both Dean and Cas in the frame.

2) Closeup on Dean/camera follows Dean as he walks or turns away from Cas, cutting Cas out of the frame.

3) Wide shot of Dean alone, emphasizing the empty space where Cas used to be.

There are some slight variations in there–for example, sometimes they cut directly from a shot with Cas in it to the wide shot without Cas–but generally, this was TPTB’s decision on how to exeunt Cas. It was a budget-conscious, technically straightforward, functional way to place Cas physically in the scene/narrative.

HOWEVER. This framing has now come to be used in scenes that Castiel is not, and never was, a part of physically at all. In the last two gifs here (another example would be Dean praying to Cas in his room at the bunker at the end of ‘Remember the Titans’), the wide shot of Dean alone doesn’t depict Cas’s departure, but rather his absence. The empty space isn’t emphatic because it’s where Cas used to be, but because it’s where Cas should be. It emphasizes that Dean wants him to be there.

So, this visual technique that used to be all about locating Castiel physically has become a visual technique for locating Dean emotionally. And I think that’s nifty. 🙂