Staging Sims for Sequential Art

Staging Sims for Sequential Art

I am by no means claiming I'm a guru of sim photography (or any kind of photography) really. These are tips and tricks I recall from taking classical animation and film in college and spending over a decade in the animation and entertainment industry. My story is by no means the epitome of any of these tips. I realize I don't follow my own advice a lot of the times and sometimes my compositions (whether single pics or sequentially) aren't the greatest.

All this is are age old tips that are somewhat the staple of most film, art and photo composition. If you can understand the "why" of it, it might help streamline your process or think of your sim pics in a different light.

Sim stories can be pretty much anything we want them to be. There's no wrong or right way to approach the way we tell our tales. Some people tell it "story book" style, where the pictures are there to illustrate the narrative. Some of us (like myself) see our stories as sequential art, such as in comic books or cinematic/television storyboards.

Sequential art (if you're not familiar with the term) is basically the art of showing things in sequence. The way we pose and compose images to naturally flow together to give us the illusion of movement. As well, it composes these images in a way that our brains can process easier from frame to frame.

Sequential Art:

People in general have very low attention spans. We like to glance at things and then move on. Only if we're interested in something will we tend to linger on a particular image. Readers don't generally analyze every element of a comic panel at first read. And for a more extreme example, no one freezes frames while they watch a movie or T.V. Show the first time through. They tend to want to move forward.

The idea is to be able to give our audience as much information we possibly can with just a glance and help build up for the next scenes.

Silhouettes, outlines and contrast

A little bit more about the way we see things: Humans see and recognize silhouettes and outlines near instantly. At a glance we recognize shapes and colours and then apply that information to what we've already stored in our memory.

A great way of “helping” the human eye along when they look at our work is with contrast. The simplest contrast is having a stark black silhouetted object against a stark white background. For example...

An Apple.

… a car

… guitar

… a house plant

… that dude with the weird peggy hair.

Same principle applies with patterns. If you have a setting with a patterned wall, you'll probably want to stay away from your characters having similarly patterned clothing or any pattern all together. Or maybe it wouldn't be a good idea to colour a wall the same colour as your character's hair. I'm glad you found that nifty cc wall paper, but you need to decide if the wall or your character is the focal point.

Priya demonstrates this nicely with this image. It's a pretty dress and a pretty wallpaper, but she's looking a little lost here.

This is better. With the wall less busy, we can focus on Priya.

I'm sure you've noticed that with all those past examples, none of the focal points are centered on our screen. That's just me paying mind to

the Rule of Thirds.

This is a compositional rule of thumb that most of us sim photographers do anyway (from what I've seen), whether conscious or not. Basically all it means is that the focal point of the image is off centered and this is more visually interesting.

This is a compositional rule of thumb that most of us sim photographers do anyway (from what I've seen), whether conscious or not. Basically all it means is that the focal point of the image is off centered and this is more visually interesting.

I won't get into to much here because I suspect we all know this. However, if you're interested in reading more, there's always Wikipedia!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thirds

“The rule states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections. Proponents of the technique claim that aligning a subject with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the composition than simply centering the subject would.” - from Wikipedia

Point of View:

This should also be a bit of a refresher for most people. You can create interesting shots depending on the point of view that you use. You most likely know the shots but here I'd like to remind ourselves why we choose these angles and why they are interesting.

Long: mostly used to create establishing shots, and sometimes to create a visually emotional image of feeling small and insignificant

Up: It gives the audience the feeling of being small and helpless. This angle is great if you want to describe how huge something is, or for a character, how strong and powerful they are.

Down: It gives the audience the 'omnipotent' view point. This is a good angle to use for establishing shots, to describe what's going on in the scene. It's also very useful for describing your character as being "small", helpless and insignificant.

Medium: Where we usually are with sim stories. You can see detail, usually be able to see where things are happening. It's a good angle for conversations, and action. It places us at level with our characters. The reader has the sense of being right there with him.

Close up: Straightforward, yes? You get right up close and personal. You can use it to visually describe detail in objects or with characters you can use it to emphasize an emotion, expression or describe intimacy.

Tip: Speaking of intimacy, more often than not I see a scene from a story where the characters are shot full body. It doesn't always work, particularly when you're trying to get your readers to be more personal with the characters. Don't be afraid to tighten the shot or crop your image to close in on the characters. You may not get all the detail of the nice room you built, but again I ask, what's more important for your story?

When we're moving through sequential art, we like our shapes to be somewhat in the same place. When the camera constantly crosses this invisible 180 degree axis that is the fourth wall, whether we realize it or not, it could be potentially disconcerting.

Again, I think most of us are aware of this. The Fourth Wall is essentially the line or wall that divides the "stage" or the "scene" from the audience. Traditionally this is simply the front of the stage. When people say "you're breaking the fourth wall" that just means the character has suddenly become "aware" of the audience and addresses them.

In sim world, sims break the fourth wall all the time when they turn to stare at you, wave their arms and whine "shoo flee" up at you.

In modern photography the camera becomes the audience. The camera moves in a 180° line or an arc behind this imaginary line.

The Fourth Wall

For all intents and purposes, this is our stage. These are our actors: on the left, Sadia, and on the right, Clancy.

Here's the breakdown of our stage. The big red line represents the “fourth wall”. As you can see, the cameras are positioned in various places behind the wall. These cameras represent us, the viewers.

Here's how Camera 1 looks.

Camera 2

Camera 3

Notice what we have in common between the previous slides is that though we shot at different camera angles, the characters remained on their respective sides of the screen.

Sadia's Side (screen left)

The basic idea is to keep these characters on their side of the screen for visual consistency.

Clancy's Side [screen right]

The basic idea is to keep these characters on their side of the screen for visual consistency.

Jumping (the camera) over the axis can make it seem that the characters had somehow switched positions even though they hadn't moved.

Clancy suddenly becomes Sadia and vice versa.

Clancy suddenly becomes Sadia and vice versa.

Clancy suddenly becomes Sadia and vice versa.

I think you get the idea.

This is our Fourth wall. We like to keep the cameras in this general area.

What happens when we jump that axis is all of a sudden the cameras are completely on the opposite side of our wall. It's just not practical for the cameras to keep moving across the stage like that.

So again, we have Sadia and Clancy on their respective sides; Different camera angle, but the Fourth Wall is respected.

Again, a bit of a visual pop. I know it's such a miniscule amount of work for our brains to figure out where our characters are and what's going on, but like we want to minimize that for the sake of story flow.

How do you know where the fourth wall when there is no “stage”? A good way to establish one in a conversation setting is the connection between our two focal points. In this case, the line between Sadia and Clancy is our axis.

No matter where they are in the scene, we can use this connection to help establish our axis.

No Sadia isn't on the screen, but we're still respecting the axis by keeping Clancy on his side of the screen. It's also always visually interesting to have a bit of a lead-in in front of our character. Clancy's energy is focused in that direction. The reader becomes interested in what he's looking at.

As well, it respects the “Rule of Thirds”. Isn't Sadia pretty, everyone? :D

Of course, the wall isn't static. You can definitely move it around to suit the action. And for good measure, you can always re-establish the scene.

Here's our stage again after we've nudged our axis. The red line represents the new fourth wall. It's a natural motion, not a sudden jump.

And Clancy finally starts to put the moves on Sadia.

See, he agrees with me: Sadia is lovely!

Isn't it nice of Sadia to show us an example of how characters can naturally cross over to the other character's screen space? O_o

Uh oh! What happens when we want to completely switch the camera angles? We definitely need to see what's going on here. You don't have to be stuck behind the fourth wall. Sudden camera angle changes are definitely good for drama. :O

Usually a good way to do this is again, simply re-establish the scene. Truck out and show your viewers where everyone is in respect to one another. Here we've completely jumped over the wall to introduce Sunshine.

This is where our wall is now.

And again, an axis is established by the dominant focal points. In our case a surprised Clancy and a jealous Sunshine.

I suppose imaginary walls aren't the only lines Clancy is crossing tonight. >.<

Pull out to re-establish the shot again....

… and create another axis between these two focal points. Yikes. Why are you named Sunshine again? D:

* facepalm *

Ah, drama!

You can by all means help focal points along using lines or shapes. Heck if it works you can use blatant arrows. Comic books do it all time. You can use shapes in the background to frame something going on. You can use the lines of the walls and floors to aim towards the focus. We tend to follow lines unconsciously so if you're composing a scene, how about switching the angle of the floorboards to point towards your characters as an example.

More Tips!

Eyelines/conversations

We are only human and that's why we tend to anthropomorphize things. Every object has a "face". Basically this is what we recognize as the front of the object. Cars have obvious "faces" but chairs can too. When composing images, it sometimes help to pretend these faces are audiences and point them towards what's going on.

And being human ourselves, we unconsciously tend to instantly sympathize with other humans. We instantly look for our sims faces when we look at an image. Eyelines are important. You want the position of the eyes to follow the rule of thirds and as much as possible you want them looking at the focal point in a conversation scene, unless of course you're trying to create that kind of emotional/mental disconnect in the character.

More Tips!

I won't get into this too much because obviously everyone has their own style. However, I've seen once in a while pics that don't work because something is in the way or the storyteller chose a different angle because the room was too small.... you know what? It's your set. Tear down that wall. Move that plant. Cheat angles if you have to, use move_Objects on to reposition sims or use OMSPs .

All that matters is the action, and your focal point, not that your positioning is perfect. Movie directors do this all the time. Just because actors start off at one point in the set doesn't mean that they stay at that exact position throughout that entire shooting. No one cares about slight inconsistencies. If you do it well, no one notices anyway. Remember your focal point.

More Tips! Sets and scenery:

More Tips!

This is a big reason why TV/movie sets are still built with traditional stage proportions and why we as sim story tellers should consider that too when creating our sets. Build to optimize your compositions. For example, it would really make no sense to line important elements up against the fourth wall knowing it would be impossible to see them unless they are used for framing or creating depth.

Just like an artist would paint the ideal scenery for their model, build your set with the scene in mind.

Building Sets:

Thank you very much for your interest in this presentation. I hope it was informative for some of you. It's always neat to find something visually engaging, so if this helped at all in anyway, then I'm happy. There is so much more that can be said but I didn't want to get too carried away and risk sounding redundant.

Please remember these are only “tips”. They're not hard-fast rules that must be followed at all costs or your sim pictures will surely fail!!! Trust your own vision and tell the story the way you want to and I'll guarantee you, you'll be fine. :)

Thank you all for sharing your stories and pictures!