The Kinoks and 3D Layout

What is a framing? What does it describe? Why? How can you manage it?
In brief, we can say that this is the way to bring the attention of the viewer’s mind where the narrator aims are.

Somewhat distorting Dziga Vertov’s concept of “Kinoglaz” , we can say that 3D layout represents the first real stage of a pre-production in which the Kinoc art – the soul of the framing – is defined and comes to life joining sounds and times in a precise and tangible way, in order to create the sensory involvement which is typical of a movie. It becomes the first draft of the film to be.

The 3D Layout, in fact, corresponds to the moment when you define the camera’s “quote behavior” , together with all its main components, such as the photography construction, the framing’s duration, the dynamic movements, as well as the sound and music.

The knowledge and management of the “machine-language” (that’s how we could call the eye shooting and telling by images) is fundamental in today’s video production system.

If in 2D animation the machine-language was often limited to horizontal and vertical Pan and Truck In and Truck Out, some Camera Shaking where necessary, a choice dictated by the perspective’s limits, in 3D animation the camera keeps all the difficulties of traditional cinema, maybe even more. If the images do not refer to the product completely made in 3D, the interaction between “real” shots and those included in post-production, become a fundamental part of the narrative message.

Thanks to this use, with no change in the acting, you can rouse several different emotions in the audience. The incompetence in this language might even lead to results opposite to those desired.

A 3D Cam doesn’t have the physical limits of a camera or a video-camera. It has empowered the cinema language exploring different possibilities that were inconceivable just a few years ago. Potentially, we could begin a long take from the Moon and, with a just camera movement, and come to a detailed image of a microbe, with an endless consequence of Pindar flights! And this is possible getting onto every traditional way of shooting, from the classic Dolly to MotionControl. The 3D Cam is often used to simulate and support shootings already made on a set.

There is just one aim for this all: to make the movie telling strong and powerful.

Therefore the layout artist’s experience is fundamental to control production’s expenditures in order to avoid “highly technological” improvisations that could spoil the narration’s fluency.

In some ways, we can say that a layout artist is a cameraman of 3D. It’s the person that deals with the 3D set from the very beginning of its main elements (scenes, settings, camera movements and characters size). It is the point of junction among the figures involved in production and post-production’s vfx.