== The perspectives of the anicamera

If [[the anicamera
http://altairandvega.wordpress.com/2012/10/09/anicamera_general_1/]]
(the virtual camera that 'films' anime) was a real camera, I'd
talk about the focal lengths of its lenses and there would be any
number of them in subtle gradations beloved by photographers. But
since the anicamera is [[entirely unconstrained by physical reality
AnicameraUnreality]] it doesn't really have focal lengths. Instead anime
has pretty much just a few different general perspectives that it uses,
although it often varies the framing from scene to scene.

(Some scenes may be framed narrowly to include only the characters
talking; other scenes may be framed quite broadly to show the characters
walking along a street with buildings and so on. Also, a little
disclaimer; this is from the perspective of a still photographer, so a
cinematographer may have a different opinion.)

The most common perspective in anime is what still photographers call
the *normal perspective*. Normal perspective is how we see the world, or
at least how we think we see it, and also the standard perspective of
drawing and painting; everything looks about the right size relative to
other things in the picture and nothing looks exaggerated. As a result
it's the default perspective in anime, used almost all the time if
characters are just standing around or doing stuff. Normal perspective
is ordinary and neutral in that it doesn't emphasize any particular
part of the scene by itself; emphasis must come from other aspects of
cinematography such as people, what's in the foreground, colour and
lighting, and selective focus.

(My impression is that anime often cheats a little bit in normal
perspective by making characters the same size even though they are not
quite the same distance from the nominal camera.)

The most common distinctive perspective in anime is probably [[*fisheye
perspective* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisheye_lens]]. The telltale
sign of a fisheye perspective is a distinct central bulge, where things
in the center of the frame are larger than things at the side of the
frame that are the same distance from the camera; if a character moves
sideways and gets smaller (or larger), you have a fisheye. Fisheyes
also exaggerate the distance between near and far objects (far objects
look much smaller). The classical place for fisheye perspective is when
the scene is showing the view through a door's peephole or sometimes a
security camera. When fisheye perspective is used as part of a regular
scene (instead of simply for an artsy shot) it emphasizes what's in the
center of the frame because the center will be (hyper-)enlarged relative
to everything else.

(My suspicion is that fisheye perspective is popular in modern anime
partly because it can be done automatically by the computer. Instead of
having to painstakingly draw everything distorted, the animators can
just draw the scene normally and then apply fisheye distortion during
final compositing.)

Next is *(ultra-)wide perspective* (aka wide angle perspective). This
exaggerates near to far distances, making near objects much larger than
normal (and far objects and people small). While ultra-wide is quite
distinctive, moderately wide angle blurs into normal perspective since
it involves only small exaggerations that can be hard to tell from what
a normal perspective would be; what I think of as the usual sign of
moderate wide angles is that the scene is focusing on some foreground
object or person while things happen in the background (generally in
reduced size). Strong wide angle emphasizes whatever element of the
scene is closest to the anicamera; an extreme wide angle pretty much
insures that this close object is the focus of attention.

([[This shot from *Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!*
</anime/misc/chu2-wideangle.jpeg>]]
([[via https://twitter.com/Nazarielle/status/268911080980484096/photo/1]])
is a good example of a strong wide angle perspective.)

The final general perspective is *telephoto perspective*, which I don't
think I've ever seen used in anime. While anime has long shots of things
far away, telephoto perspective itself is the inverse of wide angle; it
compresses the distance between near and far things, making them look
close together and stacked on top of each other. This may sound rather
abstract and unclear, so let's show you an example. [[This picture of
mine http://www.flickr.com/photos/22276923@N06/8049511767/]] is only
moderately telephoto, but at least to me it doesn't look particularly
far from the lamp post in the foreground to the elevated roadway and
then to the building behind it. In real life, it's probably several
hundred feet for each step (the elevated roadway is eight lanes wide
here, for example).

(It's entirely possible that I've overlooked cases of telephoto
perspective in anime, or maybe it's a sufficiently subtle effect
in practice that I haven't noticed it when it was in front of me.
I'd sort of be surprised if anime has genuinely never used the
perspective, even if it was just a director playing around with it. I
welcome pointers to examples, either in comments here or [[on Twitter
https://twitter.com/cks_anime/]].)

(Note that using a telephoto lens doesn't necessarily create
a telephoto perspective; for example, you can have only
a single clear thing in the picture, such as in [[this
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22276923@N06/8058481178/]] or [[this
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22276923@N06/8058240784/]]. Both were
taken with the same lens and focal length as my telephoto perspective
example.)

=== Sidebar: framing and perspective

To put it in simplistic terms, the difference between framing and
perspective is that framing is what and how much you include in the
picture while perspective is how the things in the picture look like in
relation to each other. With physical cameras, framing and perspective
are at least partially coupled together so the choice of one can put
relatively narrow constraints on your options for the other ([[less so
for cinematography than for still photography AnicameraUnreality]]).
Since anime is entirely drawn, you can frame a scene and give it
whatever perspective you want to draw; however, some combinations of
framing and perspective will look distorted, wrong, impossible, or
absurd.

I talk about perspective here rather than framing partly because I feel
that perspective has the stronger influence on the look of a scene. In
anime especially, it's possible to frame a scene in the same way (or
more or less the same way) despite significantly different perspectives.
This is not to say that framing is unimportant to a scene's look, of
course; it's just that it's less blatant than general perspective.

(The choice of perspectives is also more clearly analogous to lens
selection with physical cameras than framing is.)