Week 03: You Know What Some of the Kids Said? More about Layout

Before we get into Animation, I would like to expand a little about LAYOUT from Week 02. =)

It all start with the 12 Principles of Animation: Staging

We don't simply layout-ing, putting camera around if we know how important staging is.
If we study animation featured, we noticed how every single shots has been designed, layout nicely.

& how's my friend, Jin Liang think about layout design, do check out one of his post: Lady & The Tramp & I'm totally agree with him.

The Basic idea of Staging

We can see how everything should be organized nicely because everything appear within the frame tells the story. Good staging lead audience into the right mood of your story, it make your audience focus on your story. & Yea, it's all about story.


What we can expand from Staging is Composition,

& what we can learn from Composition is the Rule of Thirds.


This is how's the great master piece painted during Renaissance, good photography nowadays, they all followed the Rule of Thirds.

Let's take my shots for an example..




& now you can really see how I can improve my composition.


The third thing you may need to consider is Leading the Audience's Eye.

Spungella on July 2009 has great post of this topic.

The basic idea is to create an area of focus from shots to shots.
The focus area could be the position of your character, the direction of your character looking, the props that pointing to specific direction & etc.

For my shots,

shot 1 & the direction of little girl looking.

when we put shot 1 & 2 together, we can see the direction of 2 characters looking.

shot 2 & the direction of batman looking.

when we put shot 2 & 3 together, we can see the direction of 2 characters looking.

shot 3 & the direction of both of them looking.

By applying this, it would spice up your shots, & this is how you differentiate a good or bad shots.

& So here's my improved layout,

Oh yeah, what do you think? what do you think about this layout? what do you think about this piece of sharing & infomation?

feedback guys! comments!

Hope you like it.

Have Fun =)