2014-12-06
The impact of good directing illustrated
It's not often that you get a master class in the importance of directing, and in about three minutes flat. But now we have one, courtesy of a competition between Studio Khara and game developer CyberConnect2. As ANN explains (via), both studios made shorts based on the same character designs (and maybe 3D models, it's not clear), basic situation, and maybe even scenario outline, and the contrast between them is really illuminating.
Let's start with CyberConnect2's version, which you can conveniently see on YouTube. My reaction is pretty much 'well, okay'. That's a perfectly decent exhibition short, with everything you'd expect here; there's some action, some graphics, and so on. But it's kind of unimaginative and pedestrian, and at least for me there were some confusing moments where I wasn't quite sure what was going on.
Now watch Studio Khara's version, again on YouTube.
Well, wow.
We have verve. We have dynamic situations, visuals, and action sequences, with clear back and forth moments, reversals of fortune, and even the injection of some character. What's going on is always clear and grounded (and it's set in a distinct physical place to help with that). I think Khara's short goes through exactly the same beats as CC2's short does (attacked, at a disadvantage, attempt to use ranged combat, near defeat, reversal of fortune, ultimate victory), but they are presented so much better. They're interesting. They're exciting.
There's little or nothing in the Khara short that couldn't have been in the CC2 short. The difference is not CG versus hand drawn (and it's not clear to me how much of Khara's is genuinely hand drawn; some sequences looked like they at least had a lot of CG assist). Almost all of the difference comes down to Khara doing a better job of designing and realizing what happens in the scenario, in other words to directing and storyboards.
(When we talk about the quality of directing in anime, it's usually hard to find such a direct comparison. If you're looking at two scenes in real shows, there's so many variables involved; the differences between the scenes, the shows (maybe), the subjects, their budgets, and even how people feel about the two different shows. This situation is free of almost all of those variables.)
(This elaborates on some tweets of mine.)
2014-12-03
An example of telephoto perspective in anime, courtesy of Shirobako
Back in The perspectives of the anicamera I said that I didn't think I'd ever seen telephoto perspective used in anime. It turns out that I'm wrong about that, as a recent shot in Shirobako showed me. Let's start with the actual shot itself:
What we're seeing here is a classic telephoto perspective, where everything is stacked up on top of each other and there's very little distinction between close objects and further away ones. Notice, for instance, how little the size of the traffic lights changes at each step backwards into the scene, yet we're given the cue that they're not all at the same distance from us because they partially occlude each other. Even the features of the buildings in the background are relatively large and so look relatively close to us. This use of a stacked, dense perspective is deliberate and conscious on the part of the show. Nothing that the scene needs to show forces this view; in fact this shot is present almost entirely for its emotional effect (the only thing that matters for the flow of the scene is that we know the lights are red, to show why Miyamori stopped for a bit).
I suspect that this shot will feel familiar to you even if you haven't watched Shirobako. I'm pretty sure that this kind of compressed view into an urban distance cluttered with signs and wires and other parts of the city is actually not an uncommon shot and may even be common enough to be cliched. Certainly now that I've seen it here I'm sure I've also seen it before, undoubtedly going back a long way. It just didn't come to mind when I wrote the initial entry, partly because this effect is somewhat more subtle than a clearly exaggerated ultra wide angle view.
(I'm pretty sure that Neon Genesis Evangelion has similar shots and I'm sure that NGE didn't originate it. In a way it's such an obvious way of doing things if you want this effect on viewers.)