Silhouettes: Part 1, For every Action, there's a Jackson

This image is taken from the book "Cartoon Animation" by Preston Blair. Here, he demonstrates the importance of the silhouette as it relates to action. The version on the right is still understood as a duck pulling the rabbit out of a hat, but the version on the left reads better because the shapes suspended in space on a basic level communicate the same thing.

Here's another way of looking at it: I recently saw this image from the play "The Butler Didn't," currently being shown at the Metropolis Performing Arts Center in Chicago. You might remember a statement I made a while back in this blog: nothing is more visually interesting than a beautiful woman. While I still hold to this idea, the actors compensated for this. Both women are in the foreground and are dressed very nicely.

So, why is your attention first brought to the young man in the dull grey suit behind them? Well, for one, he's in mid-air. It also helps that he's in the center of the composition. But there's still two beautiful women--one wearing a short, bright red dress--that are closer to the viewer, and therefore much larger compositionally. Let's look at this through the magic of silhouette-vision (i.e. 20 minutes of work in Photoshop).

Notice how subtle the two women's poses are. The one on the right is holding a wine bottle in front of her, which protrudes it from her silhouette, drawing attention to it, but no one in this composition is crazier than the guy in mid air. His arms and legs are protruding in all different directions. The larger man in the way back has no way of drawing attention to himself other than the fact that he is wearing the brightest color on the stage. If he wanted to draw attention to himself, the best thing he could do would be to take whatever it is he's holding onto and hold it above his head. That would reveal it from his silhouette and spread out his body more.

Creating a unique silhouette is essential in communicating an idea. In the case of action, the storyteller's job is to convince the audience that an action is occurring. Though subtlety is just as important as extremes, it should be quite obvious that the more extreme a pose is, the more clear it is what is happening. With all of this in mind, look at every one of Captain America's poses from these two pages by Jack Kirby. There are probably about a thousand reasons why Kirby's work is great, but these two pages are especially good at demonstrating how a good, unique silhouette does wonders for an action sequence.

Shameless plug: that's my brother, Michael Woods, doing the crazy jump. He's an actor in Chicago; if you're ever in the area, go see a play.

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.

Character Design Basics

This is the cast of "Seinfeld."...now what's weirder, the fact that I just reduced the four main characters of a TV show down to basic shapes, or the fact that even if you've only seen commercials for the show, you know which character is which shape? This is not a coincidence. While I don't know this for a fact, it's very credible that the creators and casting directors put a lot of thought into the basic shape of the cast members.

This was all pointed out to me a few years ago in art school. The basics of character design rely on the human necessity to find visual distinction between people. At the most basic level, you have distinctions of race, gender, age, and physical disposition. I have been thinking about this recently because my roommate and I have been watching the show "Community." The cast of characters in it has a lot of visual variety in these basic levels.

Quick note before I go on: this has NOTHING to do with racist or sexist motives. It is an inherent quality in the human psyche to distinct people by gender and race, as well as age and physical disposition. On a subconscious level, when the mind is trying to recall a person, these factors simply come up first.

In "Community" the two people that share the closest resemblances on these levels are the two young girls Britta (foreground) and Annie (middle row). They're both young, white, physically fit girls. But Britta is a blonde, and Annie is a brunette: one of the primary distinctions that guys make when comparing girls. Variety is obviously not on just the basic levels, but extends into clothing style, hair, height, and all the other factors that make no two people exactly alike.

Variety is necessary in character design because an audience has to instantly 1) connect faces with names with personalities and 2) find someone in the cast that they can relate to. Variety can be something that is a part of the story, too. The original Star Wars trilogy emphasized the variety of species and character background in the Rebellion with the uniformity of the Empire. Some stories have an agenda of political correctness, which is fine, but good luck sneaking it past the audience without them catching on very early.

Sometimes, though, variety in character design isn't completely possible. With as much variety of characters in "Lord of the Rings," when I saw the first movie for the first time (having not read the books) I was so blown away by everything the film was showing me, that I sometimes got Aragorn and Boromir confused. Viggo Mortensen and Sean Bean were both perfectly cast, and looked exactly as Tolkien described their characters, and their similarities are a part of the story, but I just needed to see the film again to understand how different they both were. In other cases, factors like location and time period don't allow for visual variety. There's no two ways about it: a World War II story about US soldiers is going to have a bunch of white, physically fit, guys who are all basically the same age, and wearing the exact same clothing. The TV series "Band of Brothers" had this tremendous hurdle to deal with on a large level, and so lots of focus was put into the distinctions of personality between characters.

It's *cough cough* Abstract Art

From Here to Eternity? Gone with the Wind? Casablanca? Pretty Woman? None of the above.

Leonard Starr's "Mary Perkins: On Stage" is a soap opera newspaper comic strip from the sixties. Starr's work is incredibly detailed and rendered very realistically. He put tons of effort into not only making his characters unique, but his backgrounds as well. So, a panel like this is rather unusual for him, with the background completely obliterated by radiating lines. So why would he abstract a background?

Abstracting a background is one of the things that comics can do that is rather unique to the art form. Film can drop focus on the background, but anything more than that and it's a little alien to the medium. Comics have the luxury of letting the artist establish an environment, and then, when necessary, abstracting it--or holistically dropping it--for the sake of drawing focus on the characters. There are actually several reasons to do this, and several ways. The reason I'm focussing on is when a scene's emotion needs to be the central focus. Notice how the lines are radiating from the couple, as if their kiss has so much energy it's affecting the world around them. In this other example, a panel from Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson's "Secret Agent Corrigan," Adrienne's shock at what Burke just said is emphasized by the jagged and disrupted brush strokes around her. In my example, the woman's sadness is emphasized by the darkened background.