Amy Reeder

Perspective in Storytelling 21

I have a couple more posts before we move on to 3-point perspective!

Let’s talk about wide angle v. short angle lens.  I know I’ve loosely referred to it.  And I’ve talked a lot about manipulating perspective grids, but I don’t think I’ve said much about how they’re related.

Your reader plays a part in your story as the audience, by where you place him or her in each panel.  We put them high and low, and we bring them close or place them far.

In this panel, the reader is UNCOMFORTABLY close to this woman.  It helps that she takes up half the page.  But it also helps that I have made the perspective fairly extreme.

An extremely close shot happens when your two perspective points are closer.  In this case I don’t even think I squeezed the points closer as much as I made the entire grid taller, but in proportion to how big she is in the panel, the perspective points are very close.  This makes it so that the image changes significantly depending on an object’s orientation.

And that means her head can be much bigger in proportion to her hands, because her head is closer to us.  So when you want to draw someone popping out at the viewer, consider how short your angle is.

You could still do a close up and use a wide angle.  What this does is make it feel like the viewer is far away, but zooming in.  It makes the reader more of a spectator than IN the story.  And in that case you’ll want to avoid distorting proportions like you would in a short angle.

For more perspective posts, click here.