Roll Hard: The Ball Ultimatum

Well, we're in the home stretch now—I designed and printed out my final poster. Hard to believe it's almost over, but let's make the most of the remaining time! We'll start with a list:

First thing: I added much more functionality to the camera menus: I have sliders for shot duration, distance from the target, and height, as well as a few preset buttons. Sliders can be adjusted while the camera is shooting—you'll see in the video below that I slide the distance in and out, causing the camera to fly towards and away the target while still filming it. The Follow button is pretty much the default standard, which causes the camera to track behind the target from a normal distance; Helicopter mode sets distance and height very high, so that the camera will film from far away and above; Bourne mode mimics the "Bourne" trilogy, by setting the camera to cut often, shoot from close angles, and shake like crazy.

Here's some footage (you can pretend that the dialogue is actually a fight scene. Or a dialogue scene taking place during an earthquake):

Second thing: you'll note in the video that the cameras now rotate slowly when they're not engaged. Right now they're ending up tilted, which is disorienting, so I'm going to fix that. But I will probably have them slowly do something when unengaged, just to look more visually appealing.

Third thing: In the corner of the video you can also see a crowd of my little blob actors. I started making a crowd event for the cameras to shoot, but it's not finished yet—you'll see it soon. But basically, I'm planning on leaving the event types as 1 actor events (follow), 2 actor events (dialogues), and 3+ actor events (crowds) for now. This is what it happened to look like in my original camera behavior tree anyway.

Fourth thing: You can't really tell in the video, but I rewrote a bunch of the code for the initial placement of the camera in a shot to ensure that it doesn't collide and keeps the target unoccluded. The major change is that when the target is near a wall and the camera is trying to track behind it, the camera now moves upwards and looks down; as the target moves away from the wall, the camera slides down and moves forward slowly until it can track at normal distance.

Fifth thing: The cameras now subtly look ahead of a target based on the target velocity, instead of at the targets themselves. Remember the rule of letting the actor lead? No? Here's a picture:

 

It's a small difference, and hard to notice. But if it's not happening, you'll feel uneasy, and you won't be sure why! So now you can rest easy again. However, speaking of rules...

Sixth thing: ...Editing rules are currently being violated. I realized that I never actually posted about those on this blog, so here they are in exciting picture form:

The 180-degree rule is related to the invisible line of action in a scene. Once you've established that the camera is on one side of that line, abruptly cutting across it will be disorienting for viewers. An example, look at that dialogue scene in the above drawing: the characters seem to switch places when the camera cuts. Alternatively, think about a ball rolling from left to right—if the camera cuts across the line, it seems like the ball changes direction. This happens sometimes in my project right now.

The 30-degree rule is kind of the inverse: if the camera doesn't move enough when it cuts, you get a jump-cut. In the drawing above, it would seem like the camera suddenly lurched to the side or stuttered, instead of cutting to a new angle. So when you cut, the difference in angle from camera to target should be greater than 30 degrees. This also applies to cutting closer or further from the target—it should be a large enough jump to seem motivated.

So right now these principles aren't being enforced, but that will be fixed soon. Essentially I'm going to set ranges when the camera cuts, so that it changes enough from the previous angle, but not enough to break 180. Hopefully that will work.

Anyway, time is quickly ticking away. The big list of things to do: crowd events, editing enforcement, and more camera shots for the idioms. After that, I will use remaining time to continue tweaking things. I'm also going to be working on my final presentation pretty soon, so that's exciting as well!

Cinematography Basics: Zoom and Enhance

Tomorrow I'll have a post up about Unity, but let's get some other camera techniques out of the way: zoom and focus. Both of these also contribute to framing, which will be one of the main challenges that I'll have to handle with my intelligent cameras.

Zooming involves adjusting the focal length of the camera. It's probably not something that I'll be dealing with a lot, since my cameras can just move forwards and backwards in space if necessary. There is one cool thing that zooms can be used for, though it's not really a high-priority for me to implement: the so-called "Vertigo Shot," which you may know from Hitchcock's "Vertigo" (or maybe "Jaws"). The idea is to move the camera forward while zooming out, or move the camera backward while zooming in. That way, it makes it seem the distance between the foreground and background is shrinking or stretching. Here's a video with some examples of it used in famous movies:

Focus has to do with the camera's depth of field. I think it would be cool to play around with this: establishing shots should probably have a deep focus so everything is clear; once the camera moves in tighter, objects tied to the event can be kept in focus, while the background can be blurrier. There's also a technique called "rack-focus," where the focus shifts between multiple planes. If there's ever a time where a camera is framing one event, and a second event occurs within the frame but in the background, a rack-focus could be used to direct the audience's attention.

So now we've talking about getting things into the frame. But once they're in there, composition is important too! Here are a few rules:

Don't cut off people at the ankles, knees, or neck. It just looks odd. Still, it will be difficult to tell if objects are characters, so it will be tough for the cameras to avoid cutting people off... to avoid this, my cameras will probably always start with establishing shots, and then make sure to to keep a large chunk of the object in frame when doing closer shots. If only a small part of the object is in frame (like in the "bad" example below) things look weird.

Let the actor lead. If a camera is following a character, it should wait for the character to start walking before it begins panning. If the camera moves prematurely, it can be jarring and pull you out of the movie, because it's obvious that the cameraman started moving in anticipation of what he knew would happen next. This shouldn't be a problem for my project, because the cameras don't know what's going to happen next anyway, and are always waiting for their targets to make the first move. I've sometimes heard that if the camera and character are both moving, the camera should stop before the character does… But I don't think this is as glaring as the start of the action. Besides, my cameras wouldn't know to stop early anyway.

Use negative space. Framing things in the dead-center of the composition is boring. But this is especially important with movement: if a character is walking and the camera is tracking next to them, the composition should leave empty space in from of the character. You really don't want the character to look like they're walking off the frame, or for it to seem like the camera isn't keeping up. Even when a character is still, the camera should leave space in the direction that they're looking. If this rule is being broken, there's probably a reason for it…

…Like maybe you're watching a horror movie. Once you know to look out for this, you can ready yourself for lots of cheap jump scares.

Sure, it's usually just a cat jumping out. But at least you know that the cameraman was shooting that way on purpose.

Next time on Cinematography Basics: Editing and cuts!

Cinematography Basics: Panning and Tilting and Tracking, Oh My

I've been playing around in Unity to get a feel for how this game engine works, so soon I can get started on building a very simple environment and moving a camera around in it. Later this week I will post about my Unity progress, but I figured it couldn't hurt to do some primers on cinematography! My project is all about virtual camerawork, but I've done a lot of live-action filmmaking, and the same rules and terminology apply. Plus, I love drawing little diagrams, and everybody loves blog posts with pictures.

First up, basic camera moves. Let's break it down into three basic actions: Pans, tilts, and tracks. In general, most complex camera moves are just combinations of these elements.

(Note: In some cases, I've heard certain terms be used differently by different directors, in different filmmaking books, on different websites, and so on. At the very least, these primers will make clear what I mean when I use these phrases, so you'll know what I'm talking about in later blog posts)

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Panning
A camera pans when it rotates horizontally, either from left to right or from right to left.

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Tilting
The camera rotates vertically, either from up to down or from down to up.

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Tracking
In a tracking shot, the entire camera moves, rather than the direction it's pointing in. I've actually heard of this being divided up into "pedestal shots" (where the camera raises or lowers, as if it's on a tripod), "dolly shots" (where the camera moves forward or backward, as if on dolly tracks), and "trucking shots" (where the camera moves left or right). But for simplicity's sake, I'm going to lump them all into "tracking shots," where the camera physically moves. You can also think of this as a "crane shot," as if this the camera is on a crane which can move it in any direction.

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These elements are great enough on their own, but boil 'em together and you get 6 delicious degrees of freedom, allowing your camera to position and orient itself however it wants.

Next time on Cinematography Basics: Zooms, focus, framing, and composition!