This video provides a comprehensive lesson on the fundamentals of storyboarding and cinematography, using examples from anime and film. Shai, an AI-powered storyboard generator, can help quickly visualize scenes and accelerate the pre-production process.
## Transcript Below
Spike and Asof are having a heated conversation at an outdoor restaurant. The two exchange words and Spike implies that he knows more about Asimov’s identity than he initially let on. He removes one of Asimov’s valuable drug capsules from his pocket, throws it into the air and shoots it. Asimov is shocked and Spike looks on with a cocky grin.
When written out like this, it’s clear to see why these shots were chosen. In each shot, the subject of the sentence is the main focus. When we approach boarding out our scripts, we should always ask ourselves: **what are we trying to show with this particular shot?** Are we showing the setting, choreography, or some minuscule change in expression? Depending on the answer to that question, we can choose where to place our camera.
### Camera Distance and Shot Types
If we’re trying to show a vast expanse or setting, you can place the camera far away from our characters to get that **ultra wide shot**. We can move our camera a little bit closer for the **wide shot** – this allows us to still see the figures from head to toe, but we’re a little bit tighter in on the subjects. These types of shots are really good for giving the viewer a sense of the setting as well as any full body acting or choreography.
Bringing the camera even closer in, we get our **medium and mid close shots**. These are a great balance between getting facial expression as well as any physical acting that we get from the actors. When our subject fills most of the screen, we have our **closeup**. These are great for highlighting emotions in a character or maybe we’re emphasizing an important prop. Just be careful not to overuse them because they can be disorienting as you don’t see much of the environment, and they can lose their impact if they’re used too frequently.
We can get our camera right up in there for the **extreme closeup** if we want to really add an exclamation point to a particular emotion.
### Camera Height and Perspective
The next thing to consider in terms of where we place our camera is the camera height. Each of these conveys a different emotional characteristic, but there’s also practical reasons why you might position your camera differently. For example, if one character’s on a balcony looking down and the other’s on the street looking up, you probably want to film the street level character from above so that it reflects the character’s perspective.
As mentioned, another reason you may change the height of the camera is the emotional quality that it conveys. Stereotypically, you’re going to hear that framing a character from below makes them look triumphant and more powerful, whereas filming them from above makes them feel weaker and overpowered.
### Understanding Lenses
Another really important thing to consider is the lens we’re using. Whether or not you’re working for live-action or animation, understanding lenses or at least having a good sense of how different lenses affect an image is going to be really helpful.
**Long lenses** will flatten an image and give it an almost storybook perspective. There’s also going to be a lot less scale distortion. You’ll see in the wide lens that things that are closer get really dramatically bigger, whereas this will just tend to flatten everything out to its true scale.
**Normal lenses** are what you’d expect – they’re shots taken with a lens that’s very similar to the human eye.
**Wide angle and fisheye lenses** have a much greater field of view, so you can simultaneously see above and below the camera. The result of this is an image that appears more rounded, dynamic, and a little chaotic. These shots are great when you have a really intense or dynamic scene.
I could do an entire lesson on drawing in different lenses, but I think a good course of action is to do studies from film and photography. Also, if you have the means to get a hand on some of these lenses, it’s really helpful to play around with them, take some shots and get used to the types of images they produce.
### Compositional Balance
Compositional balance will shape the mood of a particular shot. You can think of the elements on your canvas as having weight depending on how large the shapes are. If we distribute these weights evenly, then we create a canvas that feels neutral, balanced, and calm. This would be a good choice for establishing shots or shots where the emotional tension hasn’t risen yet.
If we want things to feel more dynamic and energetic, we can use an **unbalanced composition**. We can accomplish this by unevenly distributing our compositional shapes and using a tilted camera or tilted horizon line.
Another compositional tool we can use to create tension is how close we place our subject to the edge of the canvas. The closer we place our subject to the so-called dead zones, or even have them cut off by the frame entirely, the more tension we can create in the shot. You’ll see this in a lot of horror compositions – by cutting off the subject or not having everything displayed on screen, we end up creating a subconscious feeling of unease in the viewer.
### Practical Example: Cowboy Bebop Scene Analysis
So let’s take a look at another scene from Cowboy Bebop and see how they use these tools to build a narrative:
We start with a balanced composition of the ship in the background and our character in the foreground. The camera then cuts to a medium shot of our character, still maintaining a balanced composition. As the scene progresses and the tension builds, we see the camera start to tilt and the compositions become more unbalanced. The shots become tighter and more dynamic, culminating in a chaotic and action-packed sequence. The scene then ends with a return to a more balanced composition as the tension subsides.
I hope this lesson was helpful! If you want to learn more about art and animation, I have a ton of courses available on my Gumroad page – you can find the links in the description below. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you in the next one!