The Visual Story

Chapter 3: Space

• Space is a complex visual component, it not only defines the screen where all the other visual components are seen, but space itself has several subcomponents.

Part One: defines the 4 subcomponents of space: deep, flat, limited and ambiguous.

• The physical nature of a screen is strictly 2-dimensional, movie, TV, computers screens are all flat surfaces that can be measured in height and width but practically speaking, no depth.
• Pictures can appear three-dimensional even though they're being viewed on flat two-dimensional screen surfaces.
• Deep Space: is the illusion of a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional screen surface.
• The audience believes they see depth on a two-dimensional screen because of depth cues.
• Depth cue: is making the audience believe the two-dimensional picture they see has depth where it in fact doesn't, i.e depth cur are visual elements that create the illusion of depth.
• The most important depth cue is perspective.
• When a plane's top and bottom lines are parallel and its left and right side lines are parallel this is a frontal plane.
• Perspective comes in three basics types: one-point, two-point and three-point perspective.
• One-Point Perspective: when lines along the top and bottom of the plane appear to meet or converge at a single point this is called a vanishing point VP, usually this appears on the horizon but it can elsewhere. This then creates a longitudinal plane, an extremely important cue to illusory depth.
• The longitudinal plane appears to have depth, an example (one-point perspective) of this is standing in the middle of a railroad track, the rails appear to meet/ converge at a VP on the horizon, however the rail never meets they always remain parallel but they appear to converge toward the VP.
• Two-point Perspective: uses two VP's, more lines have been added to the longitudinal plane to make the convergence more obvious, the viewing position may have been raised or lowered now the sides of the longitudinal plane are no longer parallel.
• Two VP's can also be generated using two separate longitudinal surfaces, this usually happens with buildings, the top and bottom lines of each longitudinal plane converge to separate VP's. Another example of this is a corner of a room because the VP's are hidden behind the longitudinal planes but they are still converging lines.
• Three-Point Perspective: for example on a building all the lines will converge to one of three VP's. One VP will appear above the building, the other two will appear along the horizon line to the building's left and right.
• Perspective, VP's and longitudinal planes can be applied to anything, for example when a camera is at eye level, an actress is like a flat frontal plane. When the camera is lowered and tilted up the actress becomes a longitudinal plane this occurs when the camera is raised and tilted down at the actress.
• VP's help keep the audience's attention on actresses, this does not mean you must locate one all the time but its a good tip.
• However as a VP leaves the frame, its ability to attract the audience attention decreases.
• Moving from 1-2-3 point perspective is a visual progression, the more VP's the greater the illusion of depth, one VP will create the illusion of depth adding more will enhance the illusion of deep space.
• You can have many more than three VP's but three is an advantage for the picture maker because it means there are only three levels of illusory depth possible when using perspective and convergence.