This week's assignment is to go out on the town and take photographs of a location you could actually visit - take detail shots, mood shots, whathaveyou - and compile a mockup sheet. After that, the name of the game is choosing a style to emulate.
And, since I was away from the city on the weekend, I present to you my location:
My grandparents' place on Salt Spring Island.
The layout style I've chosen is that of Disney's Enchanted, which is only partially animated:
(The concept art for this is currently eluding me, so until a style sheet is compiled, please enjoy the YouTube snippet that will - in all likelihood - be taken down quite soon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ovlr3cypTY )
And has, in itself, taken stylistic cues from the works of Alphonse Mucha:
In my previous blog, I explored the purposes of beat boards and what they could accomplish. The key is in the composition, framing the shot to bring attention to what is most important in the scene - good storytelling being essential above all else when you are... well, trying to tell a story.
Least Intense:
1 ) Our protagonist, a young girl, witnesses a fight break out between her mother and her brother - her mother's friend intervening. The girl stops in her tracks. Front and center of the frame, the girl's reaction is more important than the scuffle.
2 ) Words between the three are shared as the girl stands still in the background, away from it all. Despite being furthest away from the camera, the situation frames her.
Build Up:
3 ) The conversation continues and the girl's legs fidget and shake, she herself shaken. Again, we are paying attention to her reaction over the words. She is the center of the audience's attention, because the shot brings her to attention.
4 ) The girl is called for by the friend, leading the mother away as she does so.
Most Intense:
5 ) The girl's reaction to everything is with devastation and - with the time it takes to move to the next shot - reluctance. Again centered.
6 ) Focus is on her feet now, taking their time to move.
Less Intense:
6b ) Once she finally takes that step, the tension breaks.
The function that a beat board serves isn't quite the same as that of a storyboard, but they are incredibly similar; they aren't for the actions that the actors take in the scene, they're only somewhat for blocking - beat boards serve the purpose of figuring out whether the shots you choose to describe the intensity or banality of a scene will work in the final sequence.
Essentially, beat boards make sure that you - the audience - will get emotionally manipulated on an almost subliminal level! Isn't that fun?
I'll be using a scene from Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang as an example, because that movie is rad as hell, and if you haven't seen it you are bad and should feel bad. Moving on:
ROLL THE CLIP, DUDES:
Aaaaand the sequence I'm going over in this here blog entry pretty much ends after Gay Perry's car pulls into traffic and Harry Lockhart is spurred into action.
Least Intense:
1 ) The first shot. It is split very evenly down the middle of the screen, with the blacked out wall adding some sort of visual interest besides the figure - our protagonist, Harry - in the centre. Other than that? Pretty boring, very sterile.
WHY IT WORKS: It's a perfectly blank canvas. With just this, what are you expecting to happen next? If you say "corpse in the shower" without watching the full sequence, you are some sort of insane person.
2 ) The second shot, it's just Harry saying some mundane things to an off-screen love interest as he goes pee.
WHY IT WORKS:He's the most interesting thing in the shot, the darkest figure in an otherwise pretty monochromatic bathroom, until the camera pans slightly down and to the right...
Build Me Up, Buttercup:
3 ) ...revealing and bringing into focus the corpse in the shower. He's still peeing, by the way.
WHY IT WORKS: As a continuation of the last shot, the interest is now shifted from Harry over and onto the fact that there is a fucking corpse in the room.
4 ) Startled by SUDDENLY: CORPSE, Harry is urinating all over it! It's the same shot as the first one, but slightly zoomed in.
WHY IT WORKS: Since it's a repeat of a previous shot, we only really notice the changes. The dark comedy here breaks up the seriousness of the situation, and takes it out of Drama territory.
5 ) Good job, Harry Lockhart. This pretty much par for the course with your life. This is a grossed out reaction shot, where he is clearly the focus of the scene...
WHY IT WORKS: Reaction shots work, period, if you want the audience to pretty much know what a character is thinking.
6 ) Yep, it's a corpse. It's the most tilted, the most angled, and the corpse's body language is abnormal. Also, to top it all off, there's a spotlight on the dead body.
WHY IT WORKS:This shot is the most unique, in that it's the most off-kilter and askew in the sequence. Make no mistake, folks: THIS IS WHAT WE SHOULD BE TAKING NOTE OF.
Most Intense:
7 ) Back to Harry's reaction; the horror of the situation starts to set in.
WHY IT WORKS: In this shot, the tension builds because as he is reacting to it, he has to keep calm - otherwise Harmony, his love interest, might stumble upon this as well, causing all sorts of trouble for him.
Less Intense:
8 ) The tension breaks once Harmony leaves the hotel room. Harry's sudden fears of having to explain the bullshit of a dead person just cropping up in his hotel room have vanished.
WHY IT WORKS: As Harry collapses and is free from restraining his surprise, he breaks the stiff equality of the shot my moving away from the centre - and the audience can let out that breath they were holding in with the main character.
9 ) We can start to relax, knowing that Harry's got Gay Perry on the line.
WHY IT WORKS: Since this shot is so different - very dark, not as sterile as Harry's - it's a believable back and forth without having to give Perry some elaborate location.
10 ) Harry has crawled under some shelves and is staring his situation in the face. Literally!
WHY IT WORKS: The shot is framed by the corpse, the shower curtain, the shelves - he's in a dark corner, visually boxed in by his situation.
11 ) PERRY HAS THE BEST LINES.
WHY IT WORKS: I explained this in number 9!
12 ) A close up of Robert Downey Jr's beautiful doe-like eyes Harry's face,
WHY IT WORKS: He is the focus, here. Right smack dab in the middle, evenly spaced, the most evident thing in the shot: everything that's happening is all on him, so the shot itself is all him.
Perry and Harry continue to go back and forth, and then the movie continues on - and continues working to be darkly hilarious.
Can you take a guess at what we'll be discussing this week? If you cheat and look at the title, we can't be friends anymore. I'm joking, we're totally friends.
Please don't leave me.
Know your memes.
Here we have the rules again, slightly altered from the previous incarnations to apply to three point:
Objects closer to the viewer appear larger.
All parallel lines intersect at a vanishing point.
There is more than one vanishing point.
The point of view is no longer facing the horizon.
Since the viewer doesn't face the horizon line, three point perspective is largely for extreme up and extreme down shots, but it can also add a subtle dynamic to indoor scenes. However, since three point is more work than two point, you might as well get the most bang for your buck and do an X-TREME angle.
Image found through Google Images (then drawn on)
Here's a good example of an up angle. You look UP at the third vanishing point. The horizon line and the horizon line's vanishing points need not even appear in the image.
Image found through Google Images (then drawn on)
And now a down angle. You look DOWN at the third vanishing point; the horizon line and its vanishing points aren't in the image, and here we can see that the horizon line doesn't even need to be in line with the image's edges. Really, this image is just a series of vanishing points.
Image found through Google Images (then drawn on)
As you can see here, a more subtle three point perspective can be a little... well, like a ballet. Far more complex than it looks at first glance, but the technical skill required to make it look like a piece of cake?
How about I attempt all three in my thumbnails?
Perspective 3: The Re-perspectivening
Are you intimidated? Good. That means I can simplify this in a way that will blow your mind wide open and make me seem knowledgeable and cool despite my shortcomings in the subject matter.
If you can't tell, I really like cheating to make it look like I know what I'm doing.
Here, I really fudged it; even the hole should be in perspective. There is a lot wrong with this thumbnail. The perspective here is entirely... well, wrong, for the composition, because there is a horizon line here where it's not supposed to be. Whose fault is this? Entirely my own.
This is what we call a counter-example, my friends.
And again, a good counter-example. Reference your shit. Seriously. It can be really obvious if you don't know what you're doing, and can't stick plants or other things in the way.
Now, go forth. Draw, young grasshopper, using these perspective tips.
I've gone over singular point perspective, that's just in my last post - so it's time to level up. On to two point perspective, where the rules change a little:
Objects closer to the viewer appear larger.
All parallel lines intersect at a vanishing point on the horizon line.
There is more than one vanishing point.
Can you handle that one extra rule? No? Well, crank up your techno and let's break it the hell down then, because this is--
Perspective 2: Electric Boogaloo
Have you got your techno? I've got mine. Go on, I can wait. Okay, are you ready? Let's dive right in.
Here we have an example - a few examples, actually, because as it turns out my last post was really lacking in terms of following the assignment parameters - of two point perspective, with some guidelines drawn for you. Do you want to know why I draw on the guidelines? Because you are my everything.
Image found through Google Images (then drawn on)
Again, this is really... rather boring; you've got your two vanishing points on the horizon line there, and it all comes together neatly and nicely. Let's shake this up, ladies and gents!
Here, we move on to my thumbnail examples and personal notes:
Foreground elements are cool because they can even out the image. Here, I have a building right in the forefront. Notice that it doesn't grab your attention as much as the background, because it serves as visual relief, and takes down the amount of detail/pencil mileage you need to fill up the image.
...They are great in a time crunch, by the way.
In the same vein as foreground elements, you don't need to have ALL THE THINGS. You can leave it largely to organic shapes, with some architectural accents. How many or how little is up to you, but you don't have to crank the detail up to 11 to get a nice image.
Seriously. This is a lesson. A valuable one.
They can't all be winners. I'm telling you that right now, because this is one thumbnail that would just not do what I wanted. I attempted an extreme angle with really close vanishing points, but that didn't work out. I moved the horizon line way up, that didn't work out for me so well either. So I tried something fairly average, which was turning out rather well until I Bob Rossed¹ all over it.
The lesson? Sometimes, you will draw crap. Don't get discouraged by it. Learn from the crap.
I learned that putting the vanishing points really close together looks really fucking bizarre, no matter how many times I attempted to pull it off (there were several, actually).
And now, for the not-thumbnail-but-still-very-much-a-draft image:
Here's an attempt to apply the first two principles. Applying the third one would have been counterproductive, so I skipped it (haaa). I've got a big tree to the side to balance out the large wall/gate, and a large grassy area I resisted putting fountains and things on. Shabang. Done.
¹ Bob Ross [bɑb rɑs] -verb
To make something nice and then take the artistic equivalent of a shit all over it by doing a big blotch in the middle.
