Tuesday 3 January 2012

Bruce Block: The Visual Story: Chapter 3: Space: Part 1

I have advanced onto chapter three of Bruce Blocks: The Visual Chapter, this chapter makes up about 30% of the book and concentrates on the complex nature of space in cinematography, both in terms of the space in the screen world (which will be discussed in this post) and the space in the real world, aka aspect ratios and the picture frame, which will be discussed in part two.

Deep Space is the first space element we learn. Deep space is the illusion of depth through specific depth cues. Think of it this way, if your viewing a flat plane such as a wall straight on it has no depth, however if you move the camera to the side you reveal depth, a One Point Perspective is created when the verges of an object appear to disappear into the distance, a classic example of this would be looking at a railroad track.


A Two Point Perspective uses two vanishing points, this can be created by lifting or lowering the camera so an object appears unparallelled, or simply by using two surfaces of an object, such as the corner of a building or the corner of a room. A 3 Point Perspective can be achieved by say altering the height of an image that has two surfaces to create a third vanishing point, for example looking up on a cornered building. Perspectives can be achieved on any object even actors, tilt the camera up or down and an actor gains perspective. Positioning objects in between vanishing points draws attention, changing from one perspective to another can be considered a visual progression.



Size Difference is when you position objects and actors in the forgroud, midground and backgroud to create depth, it is sometimes called staging in depth, objects in the FG will appear large while objects in BG will appear smaller.


Object Movement: parallel is any movement that is left, right, circular or diagonal to the picture plane, where as perpendicular is movement towards or away from the camera, either straight on or diagonal. Objects moving in The FG, MG and BG will create depth. Relative movement is created when two objects, one in FG and one in the BG move simultaneously, the background movement will appear to take longer than foreground movement, this all adds to the illusion of depth, a good example of parallel movement would be a man walking from the left of the screen to right, a good example of perpendicular movement and relative movement would be a plane taking off.



Camera Movement: Dolly movements creates depth between the Foreground and the Background, the Forground would appear to get larger faster than the Backgroud. The same occurs with tracking, the Foregroud will move past faster than the Backgroud creating a depth cue, same goes for crane shots, The foreground will dissapear quickly while the backgroud barely moves.



Deep Space can also be created by Diffusion, there are two types of diffusion Textual and Ariel. Textual is created when an object texture and detail diminish and become distorted, the more distorted an objects texture the further away they appear to be. Ariel is created by particles in the air, for example on a foggy day texture in the background will appear more diffused which creates depth. For diffusion to work you need an effected and unaffected appear.


Tonal Seperation, this one is reltively simple, viewers tend to percieve dark tones as further away than lighter tones, the same applyes to colours, the viewer would percieve a cool colour such as blue to be further away then say a warm colour such as red.



The last two depth cues are Up/Down Positioning and Focus, objects and people who are lower usually appear in foreground while higher objects and people appear further away. As for focus, a blurred backgroud will appear further away, while the unblurred object will appear closer.
Part Two covers Flat Space, Limited Space and Ambiguous Space

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