Art Journal 003: Cameras

One of my favorite parts of planning a comic, and one of the most meticulous and time-consuming for me to actually do, is work the camera.  All of my comics start out as a visual narrative in my head, like a private cinema that only I can see, and it plays over and over again, changing slightly each time as I make edits and work out how a sequence of events might flow.  The camera represents the reader’s window into your world, and when I consider how a scene plays out I am always conscious of how framing that window can work in my favor, either by highlighting or downplaying certain areas of a scene, whether it’s high or low, cropped tight or a wide fisheye.  I put a lot of thought into the camera, always, and since I’m doing a particular trick with it in my current page I’ll talk about some of the thought that goes into how I lead a reader through the worlds I’m creating.

There are a couple basic rules to keep in mind when you arrange your camera and they’re basically rules surrounding the way your reader’s eyes actually mechanically work.  If you’re assuming a Western audience they will be conditioned to put their eyes in the top left corner of a box and scan across and back, down to the bottom right corner- this is why putting a right-facing figure in the left side of your frame creates a sense of openness and a left-facing character in the right side of the frame denotes resistance.  If you’re familiar with film you may have heard of the Rule of Thirds: if you take your frame and divide it into thirds horizontally and vertically, the four points where your dividing lines intersect are points of visual interest and a good place to put things you’d want someone’s eye to be drawn to (like a splash of sharp contrast or an important face).  Assuming you’re not working with blank backgroundless frames you’re always going to have a horizon line, and in terms of your camera your horizon line represents the viewer’s eye level- putting the horizon low in your frame gives a sense of largeness, power or confidence projected onto the subjects in the frame being viewed from such a low angle; or, with the right context, can make the viewer feel a sense of smallness and vulnerability as the world towers around them.  Raising the horizon line brings the viewer up into the air, giving them a sense of omniscience, a birds eye view removed from the setting below; this could also be used to denote a sneaky observer spying on a scene or build a sense of covertness and stealth.  With those basics in mind you can experiment and try to draw the same one scene from multiple angles, achieving different levels of emotional impact from what is essentially the same subjects- even in a calm conversational scene there’s more interesting ways to frame your shot than simply having one person on the left, one on the right and the viewer at eye level with both of them.

Motion is powerful aspect of using cameras in a comic, and it’s probably one of the key elements in what brings a sequential narrative to life!  Since comics generally don’t move, it’s the space between one frame and another- or one camera shot and the next- that creates a sense of movement, life, time and mood.  When I move my camera from panel to panel I like to imagine the physical movement of it within the fishbowl of the world- how would it move from one moment to the next on film?  It wouldn’t teleport all over the place, it’d glide from one key spot to another, turn and follow a subject.  Maintaining focus on one subject as the camera changes angles gives the viewer a sense of continuity, of staying in one shot for an extended period of time, whereas the camera cutting to another angle implies the end of one segment and the beginning of another.  Multiple frames with a fixed camera can imply a sense of time stretching, of a moment expanding and unfolding as we see quick bursts of subject play out frame by frame.  A camera drifting during a scene can shift focus away, implying a natural transition to another perspective.  Think about what you want to achieve and how the movement of the camera can help you achieve it.  Think of the camera as a character- as the viewer- and how the viewer’s attention might naturally move throughout a scene.  Consider how you observe your own environment. the way your own attention shifts from focal point to focal point- capturing a natural sense of movement between your frames can make a scene feel real and alive and more than just a sequence of pictures!

One of the great things about comics as opposed to film is you have the power to do the impossible!  You don’t have any hardware limitations, you can make the camera do anything you want!  Over the years I’ve developed a couple of tricks I like to bring out in different scenarios- I always like to experiment and try new things, but if something is tried and true I’ll bring it back and use it again, and two of my favorite camera tricks are the Panoramic Fisheye and the First Person Perspectives.  These two tricks in particular come up fairly often over the course of my comic so I’ll take a moment to flesh out how I like to make them work:

The Panoramic Fisheye is a trick where I’ll lock a camera in one fixed position and then compress its rotation and movement into a single comic panel.  The top of a tall panel might be looking up, the middle of the panel would be at an angular perspective and the bottom would be looking straight forward (page 155, for example) or it might be a wide panel, moving from the left to the center and ending to the right (page 329).  Time and space is compressed into a moment, but if you look at certain points the eye is drawn towards then you’ll see what appears to be a correct perspective.  The way this trick works is that the reader isn’t going to be looking at everything at once, the elements of the scene will draw and focus their attention to specific regions of the page; they’ll be looking at a silhouette down the hallway but their peripheral vision will inform them of the rest of the hallway as it creates context for their subject.  Since the subject is the focus it isn’t immediately jarring that the peripheral might be bending a little bit, and when the eyes sweep across to the next focal point that same bending peripheral will contextualize the next focal point, and so on. A vertical panoramic shot is even easier to contextualize since the limitations of reading a comic on the web means you know the viewer is going to have to do some degree of vertical scrolling, so while the lower parts of the frame are hidden the act of scrolling to observe it will cause it to roll into view naturally, creating the sense of a camera pivoting on its tripod!  I think of it as a river, with visual focal points acting as stepping stones for the viewer to progress through the fluidity of the camera without being swept away in the current- your subjects are the important part, everything else can bend around them and connect one instant to another.

The First Person Perspective seems fairly straightforward at first- after all, isn’t the camera itself the stand-in for the reader’s own first person perspective?  Well, yes and no.  While it’s true that the camera is the window through which the viewer perceives the world, and the viewer is perceiving it from their own first person perspective, if we want to trick the eye into being someone else’s eye we need to establish the right context to take the viewer out of themself and put them inside our subject!  The height and motion of the camera becomes extremely important when you’re no longer a free-wheeling invisible camera, you’re putting the viewer inside someone’s head on someone’s shoulders and that’s how they’re observing the world.  The camera motion and position aren’t quite enough to remove the viewer from themself, though, which is where your peripheral and your context become important.  When you’re in someone’s head how does the rest of them enter your field of view?  Everyone has one dominant eye, does your nose edge into your field of view?  Does your hair frame your vision?  How do your hands enter your sight picture, and when you look down at yourself what do you see? Maybe they see their own shadow cast on a wall or they can see themselves in a mirror.  Once you figure out how to simulate the specific perspective of the self you can use it to your advantage.  A couple examples I’ve used is a character looking over his shoulder, frustrated with a stolen phone (page 368) or a character assessing a precarious situation in a moment of self-reflection (page 443).  Rather than show a man trying to guess a voicemail password we can put the viewer in his place to show his train of thought, and rather than just pan a shot over a crowded alleyway we can bring the viewer into the character on a ledge as she observes just how precarious it is.  It’s a perspective that can make a situation much more personal to the characters as well as the viewer and when used sparingly it can have a big impact on your scene!

In the comic I’m currently working on I tried to combine a little bit of both tricks to pull off a different visual stunt: I wanted to conceal the fact that one of the four main characters is not seated with the others until the very last frame, so I put the camera in her place and positioned it as if it were following the conversation going on at the table.  There’s some clues that Liz is actually the waitress- we’ve seen in previous scenes that Doris has the same workshirt Liz has, being former coworkers, so clipping it in from the side panel might be read as just being Doris again.  We can hide reflections in the koi pond mirror and we’re not using the eyebrow, nose, cheek or hair peripheral cues to denote a first-person perspective, but we’re simulating it.  In order to keep Liz out of the shot we fisheye the camera a little bit, acting as the corner of the viewer’s eye to look down the table as Alice and Monday talk to one another from diagonal seats.  It isn’t until the penultimate panel where we let the camera drift away that we can turn and show a vacant seat next to Monday, and then turn the other way to show Liz’s sentiments about her role in the town of Tombstone.

Camerawork is a lot of fun but it involves a lot of thought about depth and perspective.  I don’t really use perspective rulers or anything in my work, I eyeball everything, but I don’t really recommend jumping right into doing that yourself!  Study the math of how space and perspective work and try to develop a sense of it yourself, and once you get how the clockwork ticks you can start playing around with warping time and space to your own end. It’s one of my favorite parts of making a comic.

Thanks for reading!