A Little Exercise

Occassionally, I do these little exercises. I got inspired looking at Hans Bacher's blog. He is just so amazing with screen composition and design. So I took a situation, a Western stand-off, and quickly did a few different ways to stage some of the action. There is no continuity in these thumbnails, I just put the camera around a few different places to see what kind of composition I could come up with and find out what kind of mood each one created.
That was the real goal, creating mood. I am against "cool shots" just for the cool factor. If you're just showing off your camera rig or your layout skills without regard to enhancing the story, you are wasting your time and distracting the audience. Cool shots work best when they enhance the mood of the scene.


No. I'm not working on a wetsern, I just picked this situation because it had an immediate conflict that I didn't have to set up. Again, I wasn't considering continuity or building a story, I just wanted to see where all I could place the camera and approximate lenses (some are very wide, some are long). I did all of these sketches pretty quickly. I tried to see how many I could do in an hour and how many of them I liked. (I'm not showing you all of them)

Now a single shot (or screen composition) can't create a mood as well as a series of shots. Like single chord in music isn't as effective as a series of chords. The same way a color standing alone looks diffferent than when it surrounded by either analogous or complimentary colors. Dramatic change (from shot to shot) creates more drama and tension. Try it sometime. Cut from three or four very flat, straight on shots to a strong 3-point perspective shot and feel the drama. Or try the opposite: create a scene from several dramatic perspectives, camara moves even, then cut to a very flat staging. The flat shot gets suddenly very dramatic because it stands out.

Oh, and go visit Hans Bacher's blog. You will be inspired. http://its-a-wrap.blogspot.com/

Great Book!!

My wife just ran across a book called "In Character: Actors Acting" (just published this month). She found it an amazing piece of work and had to show me. I agree, it's the best book on facial expressions that I have seen.

As good as other facial expression books have been in the past, my one complaint with all of them has been that they don't feel genuine. They aren't real expressions. It's people off the street approximating what an angry or surprised look is. They also don't take into consideration body language. (I guess that's two complaints - sorry I miscounted.)
Where this book has the advantage over the others, is that the photos are of trained actors: Rosie Perez, Hume Cronyn, James Cromwell, Jason Alexander, to name a few. And the expressions are set up more like scenes. The actor wasn't told, "Look angry! Now infuriated!! Okay, now give me bashful." Instead the director said, "You are a man who has just been told he has inoperable cancer." or "You are a devoted father watching your handicapped daughter receive her high-school diploma." The results are incredible.
If you draw or animate, I really recommend you get this book. It is an invaluable resource. If you hate it, blame me for recommending it. If you love it, thank my wife for pointing it out to me.

Cool little item

I was going through some old photos recently, and ran across this one I took of Chris Sanders during production of "Mulan". I had just discovered the joys of medium format photography (a larger film format than 35mm, the negatives are 2 1/2 inches square). I had bought an old Soligor at a rummage sale for $5 and didn't know if it even worked. So Chris gave me a roll of film so I could find out. He also let me shoot a role with his Hasselblad, which is what I used to shoot this photo. You can see about half of my camera in the lower right hand of the frame. The dark slide from the Hasselblad is lying on the open sketchbook next to the banana in the bottom center.
But the thing I really enjoyed about finding this image again was all the history on Chris' desk. There are random sketches, memos pinned to the wall, in-house newsletters, etc. You can even see an early Sanders drawing of Crickey hanging on the wall behind him. I scanned my negative in at 400dpi and the resolution was just incredible!

Look at this zoom in. I rotated it 180 degrees so you could see better. Chris is watercoloring some storyboards for Mulan. It's the sequence where Mulan has just returned from the Matchmakers and prepares to sing her song.

The open skecthbook belongs to Nathan Greno (then an inbetweener, eventually a story artist on "Brother Bear" and "Chicken Little"), I can read his name inside the cover. It is awaiting a drawing by Chris. If you look closely, you can see the corner of another drawing of The Flash, and if I remember correctly Elliot Bour (then animator, now has just directed "Kronk's New Groove") drew that for Nathan.

Makes me wish I had collected more drawings by fellow artists in my sketchbook. Maybe one day, I'll post some of the ones I did get.
Eventually, the Soligor's shutter broke, so I bought a used Hasselblad (for a trifle more than $5). It has served me well. If I took a photo of my desk now, I wonder what I will feel nostalgic about in 10 more years.

P.S. Nathan, if you read this, you need to update your IMDB listings.