COMPOSITION STRATEGY
Some things to think about
before animating...
I've talked a little bit about animating for cell
phones. But this project will first appear on DVD. As I'm sure you're aware, the
two forms are decidedly different. So the question becomes "How best to animate
for the two?"
Cell phone screens are small and vertical. They're about 1/4 the resolution of NTSC, and turned 90 degrees (they vary in resolution, in fact, but I'm going to work under the assumption that -all- cell phones are of the 240x320 aspect, 3:4). The easiest answer would be to just take our regular renders, forget about the needs of the cell phone, and just crop the pictures to fit. But that's not the point in this endeavor. The resultant images would be smaller than need be, having large black bars at top and bottom, and the imagery might become unreadable.
This first example is a DVD appropriate 4:3 frame:
This, obviously, is the ratio we're used to seeing on television. Now, if we took this image and just dropped it onto a cell phone screen, we'd probably get something that looked like this:
The black, negative space takes up almost half of frame. A waste, as it just makes our imagery smaller. The other solution is to essentially crop in, and render vertical images, like so:
But the "problem" with this, is that we lose the horizontal action and composition we're so accustomed to.
So perhaps we should work square. As in, we render square images, creating our own square action safe in the middle of frame which will serve both the horizontal and the vertical images of TV and cell phones. Like so:
We render the overall square picture, concentrating our action to the square safe area inside of frame. This way, we can crop the renders for both TV/DVD and cell phones. The areas to be cropped are the dark grey bars:
And the results look like so:
The point I'm trying to make is that with a simple game plan, perhaps we can animate to camera in a way which will cater to both aspect ratios while maintaining as much of our original work as possible. But attempting to limit our action to a center target area, we might be able to come away with the most amount of animation without any re-animation.
This is just a theory. Feel free to offer feedback.
Cell phone screens are small and vertical. They're about 1/4 the resolution of NTSC, and turned 90 degrees (they vary in resolution, in fact, but I'm going to work under the assumption that -all- cell phones are of the 240x320 aspect, 3:4). The easiest answer would be to just take our regular renders, forget about the needs of the cell phone, and just crop the pictures to fit. But that's not the point in this endeavor. The resultant images would be smaller than need be, having large black bars at top and bottom, and the imagery might become unreadable.
This first example is a DVD appropriate 4:3 frame:
This, obviously, is the ratio we're used to seeing on television. Now, if we took this image and just dropped it onto a cell phone screen, we'd probably get something that looked like this:
The black, negative space takes up almost half of frame. A waste, as it just makes our imagery smaller. The other solution is to essentially crop in, and render vertical images, like so:
But the "problem" with this, is that we lose the horizontal action and composition we're so accustomed to.
So perhaps we should work square. As in, we render square images, creating our own square action safe in the middle of frame which will serve both the horizontal and the vertical images of TV and cell phones. Like so:
We render the overall square picture, concentrating our action to the square safe area inside of frame. This way, we can crop the renders for both TV/DVD and cell phones. The areas to be cropped are the dark grey bars:
And the results look like so:
The point I'm trying to make is that with a simple game plan, perhaps we can animate to camera in a way which will cater to both aspect ratios while maintaining as much of our original work as possible. But attempting to limit our action to a center target area, we might be able to come away with the most amount of animation without any re-animation.
This is just a theory. Feel free to offer feedback.
Posted: Wed - June 15, 2005 at 11:14 PM
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Published On: Jun 25, 2005 02:57 AM
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Published On: Jun 25, 2005 02:57 AM