From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

Staging: Advanced

From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

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Staging: Advanced

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- [Instructor] All of the images in this movie are from my previous course on storyboarding, but I do want you to at least have a basic idea about camera angles and what they tell us about the character even if you're not into storyboarding per se, it's good to be aware of this stuff. And storyboarding and camera angles and staging are really about not just showing what's happening, but communicating more about the emotional content, the inner lives of the characters, how they relate to one another, and maybe where the story is going. And shot selection and positioning of the camera is really important in this. It's not enough just to slap down a camera and show what's happening. We can go a bit beyond that. So in this case, the fact that our little employee here, Bumstead, is physically smaller than his boss, Happy Harry, this employer that he's going to work for, tells us something. Even without Happy Harry's very disturbing expression, we would still know that there's a power dynamic here. And that for the moment the employee, Bumstead, is on the wrong end of it. And we have the perspective, which we can put the perspective on the other side too if you want, but as long as the eye line and the horizon line is low it means we're looking up and we're down with Bumstead looking up at the maniac boss. I follow this through many of the boards that I did were we keep Bumstead physically lower. Again, the horizon line is low, it's about here. We're looking up at the boss. I even backlit the boss just to give him, with these horrible fluorescent lights, so he's backlit, makes him look really more menacing. He's physically bigger, I've scaled him up in a way that he isn't really physically that bigger than Bumstead, but I made him bigger anyway for comic effect. Here's a good example of doing it wrong. This is Bumstead dwarfing the boss and how would you go about fixing this? A couple of ways, you simply change the framing, you pull Bumstead down. So in this case he's clearly in trouble, he's still smaller than the boss. Now he's moved just slightly below him, but not by much. Like his head is here, the boss is about there, but we can push this even further depending on how far you want to go with this. Again, we're working in animation, we're working in a medium that should be allowing us to make these kind of silly, but very powerful statements, so don't feel forced to be literally correct if you can be more true to the spirit of what's going on in the situation and communicate to the audience visually, not with dialogue. You should be able to communicate to the audience visually. Even with the sound down they should know what's going on. And other kind of framing devices you can do, and I think this was inspired by Mr. Robot, the TV show, which loved this kind of composition. It's, I think, to show the characters are really out of place, uncomfortable, overwhelmed by the world. They're just completely being displaced by these awful empty rooms. The other thing that you can do with composition is dynamics. So this shot isn't necessarily teaching us anything about the power relationships, but it's certainly allowing us to see what's going on. And again, by moving the horizon low it enabled me to get this really nice shot and squeeze in a lot of visual information and this is more like physical content. We know where they are, they're at the bus stop. I wanted to get the bus stop in, I wanted to get the diner, and I wanted to get the police who are carrying away the young man, who was just, basically lost his mind for a moment. So the shot incorporates all of that. That would've been much harder to do or at least harder to do well had I moved the horizon line up. Another example of dynamics. So this is like a cityscape and I've added a little fallen power line just to give some visual interest. And again, this splits the space up into these nice triangular pizza slice wedges, which are much more interesting to look at. And the fact that we have this single point perspective down here, that's radiating out towards the viewer, gives us a beautiful path that our figure can run down toward the camera. So again, the scene has to communicate, in this case the brute physical action of the robot chasing the hero. And the rest should be, at this point, self-explanatory in that shot. There's one more thing that I want to point out and that is in western cultures we read from left to right, but in other cultures it's common to read from right to left. This affects how you read a screen. And many times in Japanese comics they have to be flipped from left to horizontally, or otherwise they don't read as well. Many western comics have violent, fast action, like punches, moving from the left of the screen to the right. That's only because we're habituated to read from one or the other. So in this case I'm assuming the audience is in the west, in which case we have the robot coming in from the left side. What are we gonna see first? The robot. You're going to look at, most often than not, all things being equal, unless there's some reason in the previous scene, you might track the scene more often from left to right than visa versa. So given that the main action is going to be fast I think it'll read more smoothly from here to here. Now look what happens when I flip it. The first thing we notice now is Bumstead, or at least the first thing I noticed was Bumstead, sneaking in here. So it does affect to some very subtle degree, maybe only a few frames, which part of the action you notice first. So it's worth remembering and if you want to kind of tease the audience or just do a very subtle cut, so that we want to see this happen before that. You can also change the timing. Of course, you can have the robot come in later if you want. But if you're gonna do these sudden cuts it's this very, very fine level of detail that you might want to be aware of. And this is just another example of how we can use staging to communicate emotion. This is no more than a little cubicle farm, but by staging it from a bird's eye view, we look down at the characters, we make them physically smaller, we make them humongous, so they all look like they're doing the same thing at the same time. I'm not having them lolling around, drinking coffee, having fun, they're all glued to their chairs. So again, I'm using the storyboard to communicate the psychology of the characters and the predicament of the characters to try to make us invested in their emotional lives. And that's what staging and storyboarding and animation is about.

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