Line of Sight feature

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Line of Sight feature

Postby vitalforces » Mon Jan 19, 2004 12:39 pm

I was recently trying to describe the features of FF3D to a young woman who is acting as my producer on a low-budge feature, and she kept asking me if the program "tells you if you're violating the 180-degree rule," which of course is the camera staging rule that two opposing shots, as in over-the-shoulder reverse shots, should be on the same side of the invisible eye-line between the two facing characters. At first I told her this was unnecessary and can't really be done, and depends on the skill of the storyboarder and so on, and then later I was wracking my brain trying to think of a way to put this excellent idea into practice.

My suggestion is this: Might it be possible to add a keystroke in Blueprint View (the straight-down view where actors are tiny icons), which would "turn on" a dotted line extending out straight from one eye of any selected character? In this way, wherever the character was looking, you could (1) follow the dotted line to see if it pointed to the actor or object as intended, and (2) easily determine whether the camera icons were on one side of that sight line.
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Re: Line of Sight feature

Postby Innoventive Software, LLC » Mon Jan 19, 2004 3:31 pm

vitalforces wrote:I was recently trying to describe the features of FF3D to a young woman who is acting as my producer on a low-budge feature, and she kept asking me if the program "tells you if you're violating the 180-degree rule," which of course is the camera staging rule that two opposing shots, as in over-the-shoulder reverse shots, should be on the same side of the invisible eye-line between the two facing characters. At first I told her this was unnecessary and can't really be done, and depends on the skill of the storyboarder and so on, and then later I was wracking my brain trying to think of a way to put this excellent idea into practice.

My suggestion is this: Might it be possible to add a keystroke in Blueprint View (the straight-down view where actors are tiny icons), which would "turn on" a dotted line extending out straight from one eye of any selected character? In this way, wherever the character was looking, you could (1) follow the dotted line to see if it pointed to the actor or object as intended, and (2) easily determine whether the camera icons were on one side of that sight line.


We actually have thought about this already and have some version of this type of feature slated for version 2. Attaching it to the actor's view however, gets very problematic as if they turn their head your line would swing with it, even though the other actor hadn't moved in relationship to the first one. I think it makes more sense for it to be a line which you manually place on the blueprint (and which would be invisible in the camera views) though we're certainly open to other implementation suggestions.
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Postby vitalforces » Mon Jan 19, 2004 4:51 pm

I see your point, although if the actor is turning his head it would often be intended to move his line of sight to another object. Could be either way, so I concede it makes more sense to have a manually positioned sight line. However, I would suggest taking it a step further: Allow the manual sight line to "snap" to an actor's head similar to the snap behavior of walls (though still movable by the user), and even have an on-off toggle for it to be visible as a colored line in the camera views.
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