DESIGN CRIT 002
TITLE SEQUENCE
We're revamping the first half of our title sequence to create the rising action of our story, and developing the individual story beats as we do it.
Some discussion of basic story structure and how to use it in a simple way to hugely improve your design process. We're also getting into eye movement and visual hierarchy so you can push your imagery much harder.
Some discussion of basic story structure and how to use it in a simple way to hugely improve your design process. We're also getting into eye movement and visual hierarchy so you can push your imagery much harder.
MENTIONED IN THIS VIDEO
TRANSCRIPT
Well hello my name is Carey and today we’re gonna talk about storytelling with design while we whip a motion design project into some serious shape!
We’re talking about storyboarding, which for motion graphics projects is where you make some of the biggest and most important creative decisions and define the whole look and feel of a project, if not the entire creative direction. So it’s your chance to really create something that’s yours.
And in the first of 3 parts, we looked at this storyboard submitted as a final project by a designer who completed the Visual Design Lab, a full-on design course with a series of hardcore design projects that become increasingly more challenging as you progress, and the last of which is to storyboard a title sequence of your choosing. I picked a pivotal frame from this and gave it an upgrade by figuring out what the most important ideas and elements of it were and then accentuating those in all sorts of ways, while downplaying some of the less important parts. So we talked about identifying signifiers that help or hurt whatever the design is trying to get across, and we talked about using core design tactics to lead the viewer’s eye around the frame. This time we’re gonna take it up a level and start thinking about these things across multiple frames. Really thinking about the sequence as a whole, like a filmmaker, while taking care to make each frame look as good as possible.
If you remember, this was storyboarded for the opening sequence for an imaginary show without a title or credits, about the battle of Iwo Jima, fought between American and Japanese forces on japanese soil near the end of WWII. It’s pretty clear that this story is seen from the perspective of american soldiers, but what’s really interesting is that it seems to be less about patriotism or action movie stuff, and it’s more a statement about struggle and loss. Like, these 3 frames really seem to be the point. This is what’s most compelling. The personal cost of war and the bravery of shouldering that cost. Even this last one, where the enemy surrenders, seems like an empty victory. No one has really won here. Both of these guys are wiped out. The landscape is wrecked. It’s a heavy message, but I think in this case it’s also really heartfelt, and that makes it meaningful and compelling. But there’s also a lot of imagery here that confuses that message a bit. There’s a lot of gore. There are these roots snaking around. There might be a way to make those ideas work, but the way they’re presented here, they end up signifying the wrong kinds of things, and those things are stealing focus from what’s important.
So for this frame, I zoomed in and focused more on the soldiers and what’s happening to them. I cleaned them up, and tried to better convey the feeling of them struggling, and draining or bleeding away. I really just focused on that, and I toned down things like the roots and the landscape, and altogether stripped out stuff like these liquid elements that unfortunately look like tentacles, and even cropped out the american flag. Basically tried to reduce it to the idea of these soldiers kind of draining or bleeding away as they struggle, and only then brought back in some secondary details about war.
But at the same time, I was also of course thinking of this as one image in a sequence of images. And I went ahead and imagined this frame as the climax of the whole story. A meaningful moment somewhere in the middle that we have to build to. I asked Miguel, who designed this storyboard, what he thought the story was, and he said: “…the Japanese see marines coming, the battle ensues, a marine dies, [and the] enemy surrenders.”
We’re talking about storyboarding, which for motion graphics projects is where you make some of the biggest and most important creative decisions and define the whole look and feel of a project, if not the entire creative direction. So it’s your chance to really create something that’s yours.
And in the first of 3 parts, we looked at this storyboard submitted as a final project by a designer who completed the Visual Design Lab, a full-on design course with a series of hardcore design projects that become increasingly more challenging as you progress, and the last of which is to storyboard a title sequence of your choosing. I picked a pivotal frame from this and gave it an upgrade by figuring out what the most important ideas and elements of it were and then accentuating those in all sorts of ways, while downplaying some of the less important parts. So we talked about identifying signifiers that help or hurt whatever the design is trying to get across, and we talked about using core design tactics to lead the viewer’s eye around the frame. This time we’re gonna take it up a level and start thinking about these things across multiple frames. Really thinking about the sequence as a whole, like a filmmaker, while taking care to make each frame look as good as possible.
If you remember, this was storyboarded for the opening sequence for an imaginary show without a title or credits, about the battle of Iwo Jima, fought between American and Japanese forces on japanese soil near the end of WWII. It’s pretty clear that this story is seen from the perspective of american soldiers, but what’s really interesting is that it seems to be less about patriotism or action movie stuff, and it’s more a statement about struggle and loss. Like, these 3 frames really seem to be the point. This is what’s most compelling. The personal cost of war and the bravery of shouldering that cost. Even this last one, where the enemy surrenders, seems like an empty victory. No one has really won here. Both of these guys are wiped out. The landscape is wrecked. It’s a heavy message, but I think in this case it’s also really heartfelt, and that makes it meaningful and compelling. But there’s also a lot of imagery here that confuses that message a bit. There’s a lot of gore. There are these roots snaking around. There might be a way to make those ideas work, but the way they’re presented here, they end up signifying the wrong kinds of things, and those things are stealing focus from what’s important.
So for this frame, I zoomed in and focused more on the soldiers and what’s happening to them. I cleaned them up, and tried to better convey the feeling of them struggling, and draining or bleeding away. I really just focused on that, and I toned down things like the roots and the landscape, and altogether stripped out stuff like these liquid elements that unfortunately look like tentacles, and even cropped out the american flag. Basically tried to reduce it to the idea of these soldiers kind of draining or bleeding away as they struggle, and only then brought back in some secondary details about war.
But at the same time, I was also of course thinking of this as one image in a sequence of images. And I went ahead and imagined this frame as the climax of the whole story. A meaningful moment somewhere in the middle that we have to build to. I asked Miguel, who designed this storyboard, what he thought the story was, and he said: “…the Japanese see marines coming, the battle ensues, a marine dies, [and the] enemy surrenders.”
So that’s great! It’s the story of a battle, with a start, middle, and end, as all stories have. It doesn’t have a super literal “plot”, as you’d call it. It’s not so much a sequence of events where A happens, which directly causes B to happen, which in turn leads to C. But it has that basic structure of rising action to a climax, followed by a resolution. And that’s really helpful, because simple story structures help people understand, and engage with, what’s going on. That simple story of a battle isn’t all that interesting by itself, but that’s ok, because it has compelling narratives woven through it. Meaning, ideas or themes that play out in the imagery over time. And you can develop a theme or an idea without necessarily needing it to have a start, middle, and end itself, so you can kind of layer them repeatedly into your story however you think works. Like this theme of men fading away and becoming lost to memory. It’s visualized in this frame as soldiers draining like liquids off the page. Bleeding away to nothing. And in a different way in these two, as certain figures are becoming more and more faded.
And just so we’re on the same page, a “theme” is an idea that appears repeatedly in a story. That can be a simple visual theme like certain colors, textures, or images, for example spots of red or liquids or b/w photography. Or it can be a concept that emerges out of those things and is explored, like this theme of the burden of war. And there can be many themes that weave in and out of a single story. And then the “plot” is just the order of events from start finish. It’s the structure of the story, how all of its little story beats are arranged so that first A happens, then B, then C. So the story, as a whole, is both the plot structure of A, B, then C, and also all the themes and ideas that we encounter along the way as we move through that plot. I think in this story, it’s the visual and conceptual themes that are really the compelling and interesting part, and the plot is just a simple structure that they’re hung on. Really, we just need to keep the plot real basic and not so literal, and mainly let those themes play out. So plot-wise, we just have to imply the battle building, and then resolving, and it’ll be the ideas woven through it that make it compelling.
And I’m thinking of this moment as the “climax” of this story arc: here’s the set-up, and then the rising conflict as these guys advance. That conflict reaches a peak with this firefight and this struggle, and it starts resolving into the aftermath of loss and tragedy. It’s the emotional arc of a battle without all of the literal details, but that’s something that good motion graphics projects do really well. They’re good at emotional arcs. They don’t have to tell an explicitly plot-driven story, they can be really abstract stories with a start, middle, and end as simple as some shapes entering the frame and organizing themselves. Or going from one place to another, and maybe back again. But they’re much cooler and more affecting if they can sweep you up into an emotional experience before dropping you back off. So, the more affecting ones give you moments of rising action, climaxes, and resolution. They use some kind of story structure and invest it with emotional arcs. They use all of the visual design cues at their disposal to build up to excitement or wonder or hilarity or whatever the emotion is that they’re aiming for. They’ll present themes, sometimes simple visual repetitions, sometimes conceptual. And if they’re slightly more complex, those themes may be intricately threaded throughout the story and evolve and change for however much time they have, 3 seconds or 30. So for our project, I don’t know how long this is meant to be, maybe 30 seconds, but we’ll try to establish all of that stuff on the design end, we just have to clarify our basic story a bit, both its plot and its themes.
And just so we’re on the same page, a “theme” is an idea that appears repeatedly in a story. That can be a simple visual theme like certain colors, textures, or images, for example spots of red or liquids or b/w photography. Or it can be a concept that emerges out of those things and is explored, like this theme of the burden of war. And there can be many themes that weave in and out of a single story. And then the “plot” is just the order of events from start finish. It’s the structure of the story, how all of its little story beats are arranged so that first A happens, then B, then C. So the story, as a whole, is both the plot structure of A, B, then C, and also all the themes and ideas that we encounter along the way as we move through that plot. I think in this story, it’s the visual and conceptual themes that are really the compelling and interesting part, and the plot is just a simple structure that they’re hung on. Really, we just need to keep the plot real basic and not so literal, and mainly let those themes play out. So plot-wise, we just have to imply the battle building, and then resolving, and it’ll be the ideas woven through it that make it compelling.
And I’m thinking of this moment as the “climax” of this story arc: here’s the set-up, and then the rising conflict as these guys advance. That conflict reaches a peak with this firefight and this struggle, and it starts resolving into the aftermath of loss and tragedy. It’s the emotional arc of a battle without all of the literal details, but that’s something that good motion graphics projects do really well. They’re good at emotional arcs. They don’t have to tell an explicitly plot-driven story, they can be really abstract stories with a start, middle, and end as simple as some shapes entering the frame and organizing themselves. Or going from one place to another, and maybe back again. But they’re much cooler and more affecting if they can sweep you up into an emotional experience before dropping you back off. So, the more affecting ones give you moments of rising action, climaxes, and resolution. They use some kind of story structure and invest it with emotional arcs. They use all of the visual design cues at their disposal to build up to excitement or wonder or hilarity or whatever the emotion is that they’re aiming for. They’ll present themes, sometimes simple visual repetitions, sometimes conceptual. And if they’re slightly more complex, those themes may be intricately threaded throughout the story and evolve and change for however much time they have, 3 seconds or 30. So for our project, I don’t know how long this is meant to be, maybe 30 seconds, but we’ll try to establish all of that stuff on the design end, we just have to clarify our basic story a bit, both its plot and its themes.
So let’s look at what we need. Take this first frame. This is built like a shot from the Japanese perspective, I guess from a bunker on a beach. This guy is watching american soldiers landing. From his perspective, he’s literally watching invaders storm the shores of his country. But this show is about the struggles that american soldiers endured, so we really have to see it from their perspective, and this is kind of the opposite of that. People on both sides of this battle have stories to tell, but this story is about their struggle. So I think we ditch this frame altogether, because this story isn’t from the japanese perspective. And for the same reason, I don’t think we should show any surrendering or victories. Even empty victories like this one. That’s another idea altogether. And it’s an interesting one, but again, it’s a complicated one and I think for now we really have to focus on the personal struggle, not on a perceived enemy, and not on ideas about victory or failure, who’s right and who’s wrong. This frame is a beautiful idea in its own way, but… I think it’s also gonna get the axe. Tsssh OUCH! And lastly, I’m gonna swap these two frames. This guy is all by himself and it feels like the battle is already lost here, so it should come after the climax. So we’ll move the climax a little earlier, and that gives us more time to explore the repercussions of the battle. The aftermath, since that seems like what’s most compelling here.
So first I’m gonna clean this frame up a bit. It doesn’t make much sense that the fighter plane has a bloody propeller. Ok yeah fair enough, but Indiana Jones isn’t in this, so shut up. And I’ll simplify the composition because right now it looks like a wallpaper pattern of airplanes spread evenly over the frame. This way, I can better draw attention to this central plane. I also want to try introducing some of the bleeding inks idea, to see if that’ll work out. Not sold on whether that should be happening so early in the sequence, but we’ll see. Once the sequence is more filled out, it’ll be easier to see whether these details need to be stronger or more subtle, or taken out altogether. I’m also popping this larger scale foreground plane in for some visual depth. That’s not bad. Just a quick cleanup. Probably took me 45 minutes to sort out.
Now I think we still need an intro frame because we have to establish a few things. I want to introduce these fighter planes, but have them further off in the distance. Remember, in the arc of our little story, we’re gonna try for rising action for these first few frames. In the 2nd frame we’re right up on these planes, so in the first, I’ll start smaller and quieter with the planes approaching from far away. And then it’s actually important to the story that the audience knows where this is, since we’re talking about a specific battle in a specific place. So I’m borrowing the idea of this Japanese torii gate from the murdered last frame, because it’s identifiably Japanese. In fact, it’s so identifiable that I don’t want to hit you over the head with it, so i’m gonna work to obscure it quite a bit, while keeping it recognizable. Just making it black and white like the rest of the photography helps it stand out less, and then similarly aging it kind of fades out some of the details even more, which is great. And I’ll blow out even more of its details by blurring parts of it and having it bleed ink. I’m giving it a pretty similar treatment to our soldiers from last time, reducing it to an identifiable shape and just leaving a few of the signifying details. And like in our fighter plane frame, I don’t know how much of the inks I should use just yet, so i’m guessing. We want to reveal some ideas later in the sequence, to keep it interesting, so I want to keep some cards in my back pocket. But that has to be balanced with giving the viewer enough information so they know roughly what they’re looking at, and can get interested. So there’s a balance in each story beat, or each frame, of telling them just enough to be intriguing, while not blowing your whole wad.
In fact, one of the most important points to remember here is that: every frame should add new information, whether that’s new themes, new parts of the story, new visual elements, or all of the above. If you unveil everything in one frame, there’s not much of a journey for the viewer to take. You generally need to show new things happening in each frame. There may certainly be overlap between your frames, but without anything new to discover or think about, or some evolving visuals, it’s gonna get boring to look at real quick. Things need to unfold over time, and to change. And keeping this idea of the story arc in mind helps you gauge what should probably be in each frame, so that you can decide when and where to introduce certain ideas, and certain visual elements, and build them up over time to a climax and resolution. It doesn’t have to be a clean linear ramp like this, this is just the most basic possible structure, but even something this simple helps give you a way to feel for what any particular frame should be doing, and whether you’re introducing enough new ideas, or interesting twists on established ideas, at any given moment. Or whether it’s too much too soon! My sense is that as some of the other frames are reworked, this one might end up feeling like it’s a little too much, and some aspects of it are probably gonna have to be toned down. But I’ll leave it as it is until the other frames are more finished.
In fact, one of the most important points to remember here is that: every frame should add new information, whether that’s new themes, new parts of the story, new visual elements, or all of the above. If you unveil everything in one frame, there’s not much of a journey for the viewer to take. You generally need to show new things happening in each frame. There may certainly be overlap between your frames, but without anything new to discover or think about, or some evolving visuals, it’s gonna get boring to look at real quick. Things need to unfold over time, and to change. And keeping this idea of the story arc in mind helps you gauge what should probably be in each frame, so that you can decide when and where to introduce certain ideas, and certain visual elements, and build them up over time to a climax and resolution. It doesn’t have to be a clean linear ramp like this, this is just the most basic possible structure, but even something this simple helps give you a way to feel for what any particular frame should be doing, and whether you’re introducing enough new ideas, or interesting twists on established ideas, at any given moment. Or whether it’s too much too soon! My sense is that as some of the other frames are reworked, this one might end up feeling like it’s a little too much, and some aspects of it are probably gonna have to be toned down. But I’ll leave it as it is until the other frames are more finished.
Now, this third frame is pretty good! We’re introducing the soldiers, they’re creepin in, this guy’s got just the tiniest bit of ink stuff happening, and these other guys are fading more and more as they go off into the distance. With him in the foreground we’ve got some nice depth, but you can still see these other soldiers and what’s goin on fairly well.
I would start by taking out the bloody root leg idea, because again it’s really gory, and it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I think instead of fixing that, I actually want to take this whole guy out and just replace him. And I think that’s the right move for a few reasons: First is that I want to find an image of a soldier who’s posed a little bit more dynamically, and use him to push that depth a little harder. I think this guy might work pretty well, he’s sort of diving into the frame. And then secondly, I’m thinking of this as the frame that comes right before the climax that we designed in part one, so it needs to feel like it belongs in the natural progression of these frames.
This is part of the idea of an emotional arc. For sure what’s happening in the story in each of these frames, each story “beat”, will have some emotional impact. But a lot of the emotional impact will come just from how the frames tell that story. Basic design stuff like prominent colors and how you use them, and how bright or dark the frame is, and what kind of line quality certain elements have, and is it clean or dirty or is there some chaotic pattern going on… how big the main elements are. Not only are we using all of our basic tools of value and density and texture and whatnot to show some guys running into battle, we’re also crafting a feeling. Y’know, you could say these two [climax frames] are sort of about the same things, but they feel different. If you use different colors, elements, or different approaches altogether, you of course get a very different feeling.
All of that is to say that I’m trying to tell the part of the story that comes between these two frames, but i’m trying to do that while also making this a visual middleground between these two frames, so that there’s an emotional progression from one to the next. A middleground in multiple ways: size, color, density. So first, I need a bigger main element than what was here originally, and it’ll help if it’s also darker. And I’m trying to build toward the bleeding ink idea, so it should probably take on more of that than the frame before it, and less than the frame that follows. So there’s a lot of work here trying to figure out how to use these inks to make it look like he’s kind of a photograph that’s melting, but balancing how I use them so that this whole part of the frame stays relatively dark. But so that you can still see them, I’ve turned some of them white so they show up against the blacks and dark greys of his body. I’m also introducing this blood red color and a little bit of flying dirt.
But that’s basically it. Not a huge number of changes to this one. I really just wanted this guy to fill more of the frame and bring some more of the dark values in with him, while pushing the inks harder, and introducing just a hint of the red. And just as a single isolated frame, it’s nice that I could get some more contrast in scale between him and the background soldiers, to accentuate the depth in the frame. The original is a bit flatter, and I think that scale contrast makes this just a little bit more dynamic.
I would start by taking out the bloody root leg idea, because again it’s really gory, and it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I think instead of fixing that, I actually want to take this whole guy out and just replace him. And I think that’s the right move for a few reasons: First is that I want to find an image of a soldier who’s posed a little bit more dynamically, and use him to push that depth a little harder. I think this guy might work pretty well, he’s sort of diving into the frame. And then secondly, I’m thinking of this as the frame that comes right before the climax that we designed in part one, so it needs to feel like it belongs in the natural progression of these frames.
This is part of the idea of an emotional arc. For sure what’s happening in the story in each of these frames, each story “beat”, will have some emotional impact. But a lot of the emotional impact will come just from how the frames tell that story. Basic design stuff like prominent colors and how you use them, and how bright or dark the frame is, and what kind of line quality certain elements have, and is it clean or dirty or is there some chaotic pattern going on… how big the main elements are. Not only are we using all of our basic tools of value and density and texture and whatnot to show some guys running into battle, we’re also crafting a feeling. Y’know, you could say these two [climax frames] are sort of about the same things, but they feel different. If you use different colors, elements, or different approaches altogether, you of course get a very different feeling.
All of that is to say that I’m trying to tell the part of the story that comes between these two frames, but i’m trying to do that while also making this a visual middleground between these two frames, so that there’s an emotional progression from one to the next. A middleground in multiple ways: size, color, density. So first, I need a bigger main element than what was here originally, and it’ll help if it’s also darker. And I’m trying to build toward the bleeding ink idea, so it should probably take on more of that than the frame before it, and less than the frame that follows. So there’s a lot of work here trying to figure out how to use these inks to make it look like he’s kind of a photograph that’s melting, but balancing how I use them so that this whole part of the frame stays relatively dark. But so that you can still see them, I’ve turned some of them white so they show up against the blacks and dark greys of his body. I’m also introducing this blood red color and a little bit of flying dirt.
But that’s basically it. Not a huge number of changes to this one. I really just wanted this guy to fill more of the frame and bring some more of the dark values in with him, while pushing the inks harder, and introducing just a hint of the red. And just as a single isolated frame, it’s nice that I could get some more contrast in scale between him and the background soldiers, to accentuate the depth in the frame. The original is a bit flatter, and I think that scale contrast makes this just a little bit more dynamic.
So we’ve got the first half, the rising action and climax. Now the question is: how do we come down into the resolution? The original immediately introduces these injured post-battle sequences, but I feel like we should put a transitional frame in here. Like we should reveal a little more of what’s going on in this scene. Give it some context. And there was that version from part 1, which kind of gives you the whole picture of what these guys are doing, and what’s becoming of them. There’s also more of this idea of them draining away, leaving a trail of themselves behind. That seems like it might fit back in here pretty well. So let’s do that.
Now, the idea behind these roots was that they’d be a metaphor for how the soldiers become entwined with the landscape as they give their bodies to the battlefield… but that metaphor maybe only works well in this frame. And in the climactic frame, I had toned them waaaay down so they’re not as prominent as they were originally, and I’m doing that here as well, so that they get less attention.
But then I want these smaller soldiers on the battlefield to get more attention. So just like I used value contrast to define the edges of these soldiers and separate them from each other a bit, I’m gonna introduce a brighter value on this mountain to contrast with the dark shapes of these little guys, and cut each of them out, so that their edges are really clear. There’s not much point to them being there if we don’t even recognize them for what they are, and now they’re much better defined and more visible against the background. Now they really stand out, and that looks so much better! That said, a lot of the work of making an image like this is in controlling which parts stand out first to your audience. It’s in controlling the visual hierarchy, which we talked about in part 1. Visual hierarchy is the order in which a viewer’s eyes generally perceive things in the frame. Where they look first, second, and so on. And I don’t want these little guys to stand out so much, to be so prominent that they steal attention from what’s goin on over here. So I’ve made them easier to see, but taken care that they don’t become too important by dialing the local values up, adding detail around them so they aren’t as stark. In general working with the various types of contrast to find a balance where they don’t stick out too bad.
And I’m gonna try using this larger figure to kind of block in the left side of the frame, because it’ll help give the frame a kind of foreground element, and give the viewer’s eye something else to travel to. But again it’ll be about balancing how much attention this element is asking for, not making it overpower what should be the main element. And just like everywhere else, a lot of that is about how much overall contrast each element has. Contrasts in scale, value, color, texture, and so forth. And to suss that out easier, I use the “squint test”, where you just squint your eyes until your vision is blurred.
What that does is reduce your ability to pick out the details, so it’s easier to focus on larger generalities like scale or value. And this works because detail is something that your eye automatically looks for, and is attracted to. It actually has to do with densities of contrast, but that’s a little outside our scope here, so what it means for us here is that you can hack your eyes by squinting so you can more clearly see scale, value, and color without all of the details making it hard to suss out. Squint at this and see how it changes. You wouldn’t think it’s so dramatic, but it is. And then when you stop squinting, you can see how much the finer detail returns. Doing this every few minutes with your own stuff you can more easily see how important those detail areas are gonna be to your viewers’ eyes.
And this is altogether asking for too much attention. It’s big, it’s dark, and it has a lot of detail. So one of the things I’m doing to quiet it down a bit is crushing a lot of the details out of it, and melting it more and more into these flowing inks. So I’m doing a lot of work with those inks to balance out how prominent each of these main elements are, while also using them to keep creating an eyeline that travels between these two important elements, overall, trying to create what we would call “eye movement”.
Now, the idea behind these roots was that they’d be a metaphor for how the soldiers become entwined with the landscape as they give their bodies to the battlefield… but that metaphor maybe only works well in this frame. And in the climactic frame, I had toned them waaaay down so they’re not as prominent as they were originally, and I’m doing that here as well, so that they get less attention.
But then I want these smaller soldiers on the battlefield to get more attention. So just like I used value contrast to define the edges of these soldiers and separate them from each other a bit, I’m gonna introduce a brighter value on this mountain to contrast with the dark shapes of these little guys, and cut each of them out, so that their edges are really clear. There’s not much point to them being there if we don’t even recognize them for what they are, and now they’re much better defined and more visible against the background. Now they really stand out, and that looks so much better! That said, a lot of the work of making an image like this is in controlling which parts stand out first to your audience. It’s in controlling the visual hierarchy, which we talked about in part 1. Visual hierarchy is the order in which a viewer’s eyes generally perceive things in the frame. Where they look first, second, and so on. And I don’t want these little guys to stand out so much, to be so prominent that they steal attention from what’s goin on over here. So I’ve made them easier to see, but taken care that they don’t become too important by dialing the local values up, adding detail around them so they aren’t as stark. In general working with the various types of contrast to find a balance where they don’t stick out too bad.
And I’m gonna try using this larger figure to kind of block in the left side of the frame, because it’ll help give the frame a kind of foreground element, and give the viewer’s eye something else to travel to. But again it’ll be about balancing how much attention this element is asking for, not making it overpower what should be the main element. And just like everywhere else, a lot of that is about how much overall contrast each element has. Contrasts in scale, value, color, texture, and so forth. And to suss that out easier, I use the “squint test”, where you just squint your eyes until your vision is blurred.
What that does is reduce your ability to pick out the details, so it’s easier to focus on larger generalities like scale or value. And this works because detail is something that your eye automatically looks for, and is attracted to. It actually has to do with densities of contrast, but that’s a little outside our scope here, so what it means for us here is that you can hack your eyes by squinting so you can more clearly see scale, value, and color without all of the details making it hard to suss out. Squint at this and see how it changes. You wouldn’t think it’s so dramatic, but it is. And then when you stop squinting, you can see how much the finer detail returns. Doing this every few minutes with your own stuff you can more easily see how important those detail areas are gonna be to your viewers’ eyes.
And this is altogether asking for too much attention. It’s big, it’s dark, and it has a lot of detail. So one of the things I’m doing to quiet it down a bit is crushing a lot of the details out of it, and melting it more and more into these flowing inks. So I’m doing a lot of work with those inks to balance out how prominent each of these main elements are, while also using them to keep creating an eyeline that travels between these two important elements, overall, trying to create what we would call “eye movement”.
Because getting the viewer to look at certain things in the frame, and potentially in a certain order; first, second, third… means attracting their attention from one place to another, which of course means their eyes have to physically move from one interesting part of the frame to scan over to some other interesting part. That’s called generating eye movement, and it’s useful to understand how to make that happen because you need to be able to guide the movement of your viewer’s eye to some degree so that you can direct them to what’s important. So you’re not giving them visual chaos. To go, “hey look at this. And once you’ve seen that, half a second later look at this.”
In the first fractions of a second of looking at an image, your eye is picking out the big, bold, high contrast stuff. The stuff you notice more when you squint. And then fractions of a second later it’s able to start picking out the details of that big stuff. And you can use all of that to your advantage… the scale, the value, the color, to create areas of contrast to kind of dictate what’s immediately attention-grabbing. To create an order of importance, or visual hierarchy, and get the viewer’s eye to initially move around the frame in kind of a predetermined way, so you can guide them through it a bit. It happens pretty fast, but if you can pull their attention to what’s important in that first second or two, it makes your still images much more compelling on their own, and gives them the potential to be way more interesting and exciting when you take them into animation.
This frame is kind of strange because visually both of these are still fairly prominent. So you’re gonna see them both, for sure, and in this case it doesn’t matter all that much which one you see first. What does matter, is that you definitely see this one, because it’s the important story element that tells you that all this stuff is a continuation of the previous frame. It tells you how these two relate. So I’ve given it a pretty good advantage by only using the red over here, and then also keeping the silhouette crisp and identifiable. Whereas there’s no red over here, and I’ve softened the silhouette of this guy by melting him into the inks so he’s a little harder to pick out. And then most of this other stuff is all fairly secondary by comparison. And that’s important, because if the smoke and these dudes and the landscape and the birds and the inks were all huge and bold and detailed and used that red in a dominant way, your eyes would be bouncing all over the frame and it would be really hard to look at.
In the first fractions of a second of looking at an image, your eye is picking out the big, bold, high contrast stuff. The stuff you notice more when you squint. And then fractions of a second later it’s able to start picking out the details of that big stuff. And you can use all of that to your advantage… the scale, the value, the color, to create areas of contrast to kind of dictate what’s immediately attention-grabbing. To create an order of importance, or visual hierarchy, and get the viewer’s eye to initially move around the frame in kind of a predetermined way, so you can guide them through it a bit. It happens pretty fast, but if you can pull their attention to what’s important in that first second or two, it makes your still images much more compelling on their own, and gives them the potential to be way more interesting and exciting when you take them into animation.
This frame is kind of strange because visually both of these are still fairly prominent. So you’re gonna see them both, for sure, and in this case it doesn’t matter all that much which one you see first. What does matter, is that you definitely see this one, because it’s the important story element that tells you that all this stuff is a continuation of the previous frame. It tells you how these two relate. So I’ve given it a pretty good advantage by only using the red over here, and then also keeping the silhouette crisp and identifiable. Whereas there’s no red over here, and I’ve softened the silhouette of this guy by melting him into the inks so he’s a little harder to pick out. And then most of this other stuff is all fairly secondary by comparison. And that’s important, because if the smoke and these dudes and the landscape and the birds and the inks were all huge and bold and detailed and used that red in a dominant way, your eyes would be bouncing all over the frame and it would be really hard to look at.
Granted, it’s fair to say that I could do that better. This frame is still pretty messy. But y’know part of that is intentional. This is a war, and in this frame, we’re coming out of the peak of that war. Things are distorted, obscured, liquefied… that’s one of the visual themes we’re working with, and story-wise it makes sense that that theme builds up in the first half and is pretty dominant at this point. We’re in Japan, and planes are comin in. It’s american fighter planes, they’re roaring through the sky. On the ground, troops are running into battle and it’s starting to feel chaotic. Cut to this collage of soldiers in a struggle amidst the chaos of smoke and fighter planes all being metaphorically consumed or draining away. Then pull out to reveal that they’re raising a flag, and still bleeding away as they do it, leaving a kind of chaos in their wake. It makes a kind of thematic sense if this is visually a little messy at this point in the story.
And taking that theme of chaos and increasing it over these frames is also part of the emotional arc, which isn’t so much about what you show, but how you show it and when in the sequence you show it. The visual decisions like how big things are in any given frame, and the densities of those things, and the colors and textures and how they all change over time. This is where “visual pacing” is a really helpful idea, and we’ll talk more about that in the next part, when we explore the resolution of the story by building out the final frames of this sequence.
In each of those frames, we’ll keep using all of the individual signifying elements like we talked about in part 1, to continue evolving the visual themes we’ve been using to convey the more conceptual themes of the story. Because ideally the visual themes, like the consistent use of black and white war photography, or the bits of flowing red, help to convey more complex conceptual themes, like this idea about the burden of war. Because you can get someone’s attention with pretty shapes and colors, but you can’t really hold their attention very long without giving them something to think about and experience.
That said, making sure that each frame adds new information is another good way to keep viewers interested. An easy test is that if there isn’t much of anything different happening between two frames, you probably don’t need both of them. So if you can make a series of interesting moments with new little things happening, and create a little story structure for them with a start, middle, and end however complex or simple, that goes a long way toward creating an experience that people will want to sit with for a moment. But it can be tough to see that before you do the work, so it’s totally ok to curate and edit which frames actually make it into the final sequence. Sometimes your favorite frames just don’t have a spot on the team and you gotta send them home crying. Sorry guys!
In the next part, we’re gonna re-design the last few of these frames, which will take on a slightly different character as we come down from the climax into the resolution, because we’ll have to find ways to complete that emotional arc by using all of the simple visual design tools at our disposal. So that’ll be fun. We’ll also make adjustments to all of the frames to address that really powerful issue of pacing, which is gonna help push the imagery further as a collection. We’ll get into that last 10% that can take your project from ok to great, or from great to amazing. I feel pretty good about this one so far. There are a lot of ways to imagine this being brought to life that would be really beautiful. I’d be really excited to see it realized, and that’s a pretty good sign!
So get ready for part 3! We’re gonna finish this thing off strong! See you soon!
And taking that theme of chaos and increasing it over these frames is also part of the emotional arc, which isn’t so much about what you show, but how you show it and when in the sequence you show it. The visual decisions like how big things are in any given frame, and the densities of those things, and the colors and textures and how they all change over time. This is where “visual pacing” is a really helpful idea, and we’ll talk more about that in the next part, when we explore the resolution of the story by building out the final frames of this sequence.
In each of those frames, we’ll keep using all of the individual signifying elements like we talked about in part 1, to continue evolving the visual themes we’ve been using to convey the more conceptual themes of the story. Because ideally the visual themes, like the consistent use of black and white war photography, or the bits of flowing red, help to convey more complex conceptual themes, like this idea about the burden of war. Because you can get someone’s attention with pretty shapes and colors, but you can’t really hold their attention very long without giving them something to think about and experience.
That said, making sure that each frame adds new information is another good way to keep viewers interested. An easy test is that if there isn’t much of anything different happening between two frames, you probably don’t need both of them. So if you can make a series of interesting moments with new little things happening, and create a little story structure for them with a start, middle, and end however complex or simple, that goes a long way toward creating an experience that people will want to sit with for a moment. But it can be tough to see that before you do the work, so it’s totally ok to curate and edit which frames actually make it into the final sequence. Sometimes your favorite frames just don’t have a spot on the team and you gotta send them home crying. Sorry guys!
In the next part, we’re gonna re-design the last few of these frames, which will take on a slightly different character as we come down from the climax into the resolution, because we’ll have to find ways to complete that emotional arc by using all of the simple visual design tools at our disposal. So that’ll be fun. We’ll also make adjustments to all of the frames to address that really powerful issue of pacing, which is gonna help push the imagery further as a collection. We’ll get into that last 10% that can take your project from ok to great, or from great to amazing. I feel pretty good about this one so far. There are a lot of ways to imagine this being brought to life that would be really beautiful. I’d be really excited to see it realized, and that’s a pretty good sign!
So get ready for part 3! We’re gonna finish this thing off strong! See you soon!