From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

Types of shots

From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

Start my 1-month free trial

Types of shots

“

- This is a quick introduction to the most common types of shots that you will deal with because you hear a lot of people talking about establishing shot long shot medium shot. So it's a good idea to have a simple idea of what they are. I've seen sites out there that have a list of 50 shots too much. The basic vocabulary of shots is fairly straightforward The most of these images are from a previous course I did on storyboards, story boarding isn't relevant to everybody but shot types should be known by everybody. So this is a typical establishing shot, it could have been even further out but if this was nice enough because I wanted to see the three figures here this is just a quick sketch of our three characters so we get to see them in context. They're in the park beautiful city, maybe San Francisco, we know where the actions about to begin. This is more of a long shot, we can see the full figures of the characters we can still see a lot of the background. This would be more like a photograph taken with a 35 millimeter or a 24 millimeter lens, so you get to see exactly where we are in the scene. But we also get to see our figures I can recognize them now as individuals and I can see what they're doing. Look at the guy on the right, he's seeing something that he doesn't like. A medium shot where we chop off the lower feet, we're now really moving in closer but we can see the whole body there's enough room for the arms to move around the screen and to do some performing so this is a very very common frame. Now we have a close-up where we're looking at usually one characters face, we could squeeze in one or two more but really the focus here now is on one person. Now we have an extreme close-up and this is usually on the eyes or the mouth if somebody is screaming and this is for an extreme emotional reaction and guess what he's just seen, those so this is a point of view shot we're now inside the eyes of the character and we're seeing what he sees. There are other kinds of shots like trick shots like split screen and all kinds of novelty shots but the preceding shots are the ones that you're probably dealing with more often, more so than things like this. And there's a different kind of shot that I really like, so in this sequence and this is again from my storyboard course the hero of the sequence is a little worker Bum stead who is trapped in a dead-end job and I wanted to show him at his cubicle before he gets summoned by his boss to be fired. And so what I wanted to do was to like put some, not drama but some characterization of Bum stead without loading it up with dialogue and how I did that was Insert shots. Insert shots are just looking around the scene, stress be gone pills. So we know he already he doesn't enjoy the job, this insert shot then also shows you know the fact that he's under extreme pressure and we know he's a family man and he likes a cup of coffee. And little tiny details we just gaze the camera up and there's a leak in the air-conditioning system so his boss doesn't care very much about maintaining the building, and then we're back to our poor hero. So that's a good use of a different kind of shot that's a little more playful and keep an eye out and I think you'll see insert shots there's certain kind of filmmakers that really like doing them that are really really good. They just flesh out the environment and they can give you character details that don't involve 20 lines of dialogue. So these are some finished backgrounds from a wizard animation that I've been working on, its little medieval scene and again just to give you an idea of these aren't so much shots as camera angles because camera angles can be applied to the different scenes. I could shoot this from a lower angle it would still be a medium shot, I could shoot it from a higher angle, it would still be a medium shot or whatever. So this will be like a typical perspective for the horizon line is about 1/3 or just under 1/3 or from the bottom of the screen, we can do a down shot looking up and again this is still I would still call this a medium shot even though it's a down shot looking up and we have an establishing shot looking down. So I'm just throwing these in to give you an idea about some different ways to treat the same background depending on what kind of performance you want. So this would be a more generic stage for many different scenes I could reuse this scene, this background for multiple scenes, this background is really only good for one shot but this background would be great for lots of different establishing shots but I wouldn't be able to see much acting on the character so again depending on where you put the camera and how close you put the camera to your characters it's really going to change how you animate the scene and have the audience perceives the scene so just keep these different shots in mind try to use the right shot for the right scene.

Contents