Roving Thoughts archives

The perspectives of the anicamera

If the anicamera (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 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. 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! (via) 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 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.)

(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 or this. 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). 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.)

Checking in on the Fall 2012 season midway through

This isn't quite 'midway' except by a somewhat stretched sense of time (even by my standards of delayed watching), but now that my watchlist has settled out I feel like writing it up to go along with my initial impressions. The big surprise for me this season has been how many shows I've wound up following. In contrast to spring, where I thought I was going to follow a bunch but didn't in the end , this has been the season where I thought many shows were going to drop out but they've stuck around.

Hits, more or less in order of how eager I am to watch new episodes:

• Shin Sekai Yori: This remains good and interesting but I have nothing compact to say about it. Oh, I do have one thing; it's consistently beautiful (although not always conventionally pretty) and visually well-realized. Whatever else you can say about it, I don't think SSY ever looks boring or plain.

  Now that I've read this analysis of the end credits, the SSY ED may be my favorite one of this season.

• Girls und Panzer: This continues to mix very well done sports action (yes, with tanks) with amusing events and decent characters. One of the things that make it work is that the creators are treating the whole premise not so much seriously (which would make it absurd) as respectfully; they're inviting us to enjoy it rather than laugh at it. One reason that the action works so well is that it actually makes sense and is presented so that we can follow it (sadly this is not anywhere near as common as it should be).

  I was pleased to find out that the protagonist's tragic past is far less tragic than initially hinted at. Well, not tragic at all, really. It's melodramatic but that's okay, this show is the kind of show where that fits. We're not supposed to take it completely seriously.

  (Grim tragic pasts are overdone.)

• K: Many aspects of this are quite well done but what's more and more sold me on the show has been the characters and their interactions. It's reduced the trolling lately (which I don't mind) and has started to give us decent answers to some of the outstanding questions.

  I feel that K is the second most visually impressive show that I'm watching, although it's carefully hidden behind all those blue and red filters.

• Psycho-Pass: Rather to my surprise the third episode turned my view of this show around by presenting an interesting situation and a decent mystery (and the show has sustained that momentum since then). I'm not entirely enthused about the horror tinges and how the show loves its violence against women but it remains interesting anyways. Akane gets great faces (her smug face in episode 3 helped sell me on the show) and great moments.

  The show has fortunately gotten a more interesting approach to its cinematography and setting than desperately trying to be Ghost in the Shell.

  (Violence against women is apparently the in thing this season, or maybe I'm just noticing it more this time around.)

• Robotics;Notes: I kind of would like this to keep its conspiracy plot out of my goofy mini-robots show, but I understand that I'm not going to get that. It's slowly but steadily picked up momentum and interest as it goes on. I find Kai less irritating than other people do.

• Zetsuen no Tempest: All of the main characters keep on being non-spuds. The spouting of Shakespeare lines may get irritating at some point but for now I remain interested in where this is all going. My one uncertainty is that right now I don't see how this is going to sustain itself for an apparent 22 episodes.

• Magi: I'm less enthused than I used to be, partly because it's been a bit slow moving and partly because I've learned that it's being adapted from a still-running shonen manga and thus we're probably not going to get a real ending. It would be much improved if Morgianna kicked more ass more often; she remains the best bit of the show (as she has been pretty much since her first appearance).

  Magi is a bit silly and shallow in a kids-show kind of way.

• Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo: This prospers on the alternate strengths of periodic sharp edges and brutal honesty (where the show carefully avoids the easy way out) mixed with well done and reasonably funny comedy, usually with the protagonist as the poor straight man. If you look beneath the surface I think the show is saying some interesting things (although I could be reading things into it that aren't really there).

  (By 'reasonably funny' I mean 'actually makes me laugh sometimes'.)

  I consider this show to be on the edge not so much because the current episodes are so-so but because it could very easily slip and lose the magic that's sustaining my interest so far.

• Sword Art Online: It is just as it ever was, a disappointing mixture of good and bad. If I was a smarter person I would stop watching because I'm not at all sure that I'm really enjoying it any more. See Evirus for more.

  (Sometimes I distract myself by coming up with ways to make it much better. Yes, this way lies doom .)

Finally ended:

• Eureka Seven AO: The last two episodes came out at last. I wasn't entirely happy, but it's over now.

Now declared a miss:

• Ixion Saga DT: writing up my initial impressions made me decide that this wasn't funny enough to continue watching. Since it apparently beat its cluster of related jokes into the ground in subsequent episodes, I feel justified in that decision.

Despite various (passive) sales efforts, I've continued to avoid the temptation of Busou Shinki. Apparently it's continued to be almost entirely about tiny robots doing housework and mooning over their owner rather than tiny robots kicking ass, so I don't regret this in the least.