The Two-Shot

The two-shot is any type of camera angle which hold two characters in it. With this broad definition, it's used a lot in film and comics. Fortunately, there's lots of ways to do it, all of which are explained in the book "The 5 C's of Cinematography."

For this example, I drew a normally risky two-shot, where each character is evenly placed in the panel, for the most part in a profile shot. The reason it's a risky camera angle is because when a person is perfectly profile, or facing directly, to the camera, the image is flattened and less interesting, i.e: more depth makes an image 'pop out.' There's also no background to the image, which doesn't help, but in the final version, there will be a word-balloon from the character on the right, placed in the top-center. The reason I went ahead with this angle, though, is because placing two characters profile to the camera maximizes the distance between them, which in this part of the story is important. If I wanted them to be compositionally closer together, then I might have put the camera closer to one of them as opposed to the other.

To make the shot more interesting, I looked at "The 5 C's of Cinematography" and what it had to say about two-shots. In most two-shots, you'll have one character dominating the image over another. This is done with lighting (being well-lit or shadowed), position (being higher or lower than the other character) or by "playing to the camera," (facing more toward the camera, or away from it). Since I wanted them to be eye-to-eye with each other, I couldn't make one higher than the other. The light is coming from the left of the panel, lighting the character on the right and putting the other in shadow. The character on the right is turned a little toward the camera, and the other is turned away. Lastly, the speaker is gesturing toward the other character. This not only creates an interesting shape of his silhouette, but also draws attention to the speaker.