 Welcome back and this time it's all about cameras, cameras for animation. That's right, finally. Long time into making, announced a while back and asked around on social media and LinkedIn had a huge response. So here we go. This is going to be a multi-part series where there's a lot to cover. Now why cameras? Usually students are discouraged to animate cameras. It's kind of tricky to do and kind of ruin the shot. You have to be very careful in terms of what kind of moves you have. So usually we encourage as teachers the students to just focus on the character animation. It's the character stuff and mechanics and all the intricacies that you know it's really hard to just master animation of just the character. Although for students I would recommend you at least kind of look at pans and tilt. It kind of opens up the shot and gives you more room for certain elements and certain actions. I would kind of look into that but generally students are discouraged. But when you move over to a company and a feature might be a bit less but be effects for sure you're going to deal with a lot of different camera elements and just different types of camera animation. I didn't learn any of this in school. This was purely just character stuff. So when I started that work I was just thrown into the deep ends and faced with a ton of different camera types and storytelling methods and crazy stuff. So let me go through a couple examples to show you what we have to do. So sometimes you have a fully CG shot and you have a lot of freedom in there. It can be very dynamic and very interesting. Sometimes you have a full CG shot is less dynamic but it's there specifically to tell a story point with a reveal. Sometimes you start with previous that is very dynamic kind of piggyback on that and continue to make it hopefully as cool as possible. And sometimes you get a shot where the previous is pretty much done and you kind of stick to that and you do the best you can within those camera moves. And sometimes it's in the middle of production and we call that post-vis and you do your camera moves to tell stories to follow elements. Sometimes the play element is fairly locked and you have a bit of wiggle room to move things around. And sometimes you are stuck with the play and you have to re-look at the timing of elements that are moving within the play. And sometimes it's very forgiving with a very simple live action element. And sometimes it's all tied to a certain choreography, the timing, specific actions where you really have to animate to that specific camera move, the framing. Sometimes depending on how it goes you kind of veer off and you do your thing to tell a different story. But it's mostly all tied to that plate and sometimes that can be very tricky but also very rewarding. Sometimes you have a plate that is very dynamic in all kind of different complicated actions that all have to fit within a certain frame. Sometimes lenses change and they're very very long. And sometimes the long lenses are there for a certain sense of scale and awe. And sometimes you have snap zooms and more snap zooms and more snap zooms. Sometimes you have transitions from a match move with a live action plate that then transitions into a CG element for a full CG shot. And sometimes you have a dolly zoom depending on the action that for a very specific effect. And sometimes the anime camera moves that will transition into a continuing camera move in live action. And sometimes you have a shot that just has everything. You got live action elements, you got CG elements, you got transitions to more CG elements than combined with live action and CG that then transitions back into live action and CG that then has a handoff to fully CG with all the characters and elements being CG and making sure that the framing and everything that is presented is clear and tells the story. And even though I had fun animating all those shots sometimes they can be kind of a puzzle. Like how do you put in all the storytelling poses within that camera move so that you're stuck with the move and it kind of changes your timing. So when you have shots in the effects there's always an interesting challenge when everything is CG, everything is live action with CG or combination or handoffs. It's definitely never boring. And then you can take those elements and if you work at home you can have some fun with camera shakes or more handheld aspects of it. Again putting in some snap zooms or just opening up the shot and doing some pan and tilt so that you can tell the story so it's not completely locked off. So as you can see there's a lot to cover and that's why it's a multi-part series. Now I'll show you the things that I've learned and things that I'm teaching in my classes and generally I will go over the basics but then also go into more advanced techniques and more complex setups and that's why this is a pro tip and not an FNA. So let's do this and let's start with lenses. After all this time this is actually my second clip where I introduced myself and I'm going to do this from now on. My name is JD, if you're new to this channel here I do lectures like this, I do acting analysis, I do animation analysis clips, I do rig reviews, animation news, product reviews, and I post all my workshop critiques on there and if any of these topics are interesting to you feel free to subscribe. Hit that bell button and then you don't miss any of my uploads. So why lenses first? Mainly because of habit and lazy, it's not true. But usually when I teach in classes that's the first thing that I talk about because as you start a shop you got your perspective camera and your orthographic camera and usually the students will create new camera and then start animating and that is the immediate pitfall and this is why I want to start with lenses because when you go into Maya and you start a shop you will go create cameras and a camera here and what happens is that the focal length is a 35 to a 35 millimeter that's your standard Maya camera but a 35 doesn't quite work for every action that you want to do like a more of a close-up is going to have a weird distortion because of the wider lens. So usually this is what I show in my classes, you can see the effect that it has on the face, that it has on the environment. If you go through different lenses from a very wide to a very long it can flatten the image, it can widen the image, it can could use more elements to the frame, there are many many differences depending on what lens you choose. So the lens choices and the distance from the objects to the camera is going to have a massive influence through the composition and the framing of the content of your shot. So think about the shot. Is it an action shot? Is it a dynamic shot? Is it more of a lip sync and a portrait shot? Think about the feeling that you want to convey in your shot and then adjust your lenses accordingly. So as you start a shot think about is it going to be a wide lens or is it going to be a long lens? But the real world camera information and the lenses is not the same as in Maya. That's where it can kind of get a bit complicated. So when you have your camera here you got your angle of view, you got your focal length, your camera slate but you also have your film back and you have all the information down here. In an actual camera the film back refers to the plate where the negative is placed when it is exposed to light. The film gate is the gate that holds the film to the film back. Now unless you're really trying to replicate the realistic camera information, the lens everything for Maya you don't really have to worry about this. But still the names and the terms in Maya does not quite the same as in real life. So when you talk about sensor size, film back, film format you will actually see camera aperture in Maya and you can see that this is also inches and millimeters. Now the film gate dropdown list has presets available that you can use to match footage if necessary. So as you cycle through these the 35 millimeter academy or a 35 millimeter anamorphic you will see that those values are changing. The presets will adjust the camera aperture, the film aspect ratio and lens squeeze information. Now as you adjust those things there's one more thing you have to pay attention to among many other things but one of them is the difference between render resolution and film gate. So when you look through this camera you're going to create a sphere and this is what we're looking at. So in the attribute editor on the fit resolution gate you can choose overscan. Under the display options turn on film gate, turn on display resolution on the display options and turn off display gate mask and you set overscan to 1.1 in my case here and that way you can really see what is the film game, what is the actual resolution. So for me 1920 by 1080 is what's being rendered or what I chose is the 35 millimeter full aperture and you can change this to academy and again anamorphic and change overscan again to see what is going on. So those two boundaries can be totally different. Now even if you match them you only match the real world with the CG camera. You still will have to match the actual objects and their size within your scene so if in real world I'm filming myself and I'm six foot something I'm 184 centimeters and let's say I am whatever like a meter away from the lens that has to be the same within your scene. Your character has to be six feet or 184 centimeters and has to be a meter away from the lens so that it really matches the scales so it's not just the camera information but also the size and the scale of the objects within your scene because if any of this is not correct the replication what you see through your CG camera is coming completely off that's bad for a match move so your tracking is off potential simulations of water and smoke whatever that can be off the lighting will be off the light intensity to fall off so there's a lot to think about and then that's the end I chose anamorphic well if you choose that then you gotta think about distortion. The whole transition from a live action transferring that onto a CG camera is very elaborate and can be fairly complicated. Now that being said if you want to dive into that because that's really super nerdy I have links in description with more information which give you information like this focal length is the optical magnification power of a lens the field of view will be different on cameras with the same film back sizes using lenses of different focal lengths the FOV will also be different if the cameras use lenses with the same focal lengths but have different film back sizes. FOV is determined by the relationship between film back and focal length so once you start nerding out with that that rabbit hole goes fairly deep are you shooting on film or digital what kind of sensor is it is a full frame is a crop so what you say that a 35 millimeter prime lens is kind of like a 55 in a digital environment depends but then you can start nerding out about what the human eye sees and with people say it's sometimes between 40 and 60 millimeter sometimes your read is exactly 42 millimeter but if you really look at what I'm looking at if I'm looking at my lens that stuff is really blurry I mean how do you really replicate what a human is seeing all information is of course really really important if you want to replicate real life in the CG environment we're fairly lucky that sometimes on shows when we select a camera we have a lens kit so it shows only the lenses that have been used during the actual production so that we don't come up with some crazy lenses that don't match the look and feel and the language that has been used in the live action elements but if you're doing a full CG shot I mean you can use a 59.3 millimeter and who cares I mean I know some people will care well actually it's not right totally get it I mean you can nerd out it's totally fine then again more information in the description if you really want to go deep into that topic that being said as I'm going to continue with the series I will dive into some of those more complex elements so it's not just going to be super basic but it's going to be kind of a range between basic and super nerdy for you if you're working a CG environment fully CG I would start looking at the focal length in the field of view so if I go back into mine look at my camera here you can see that if I change the angle of view you can see how it changes on the camera presentation same thing with the focal length it's just kind of neat but then again it doesn't really matter you have to look through the camera and really compose your shots depending on that I just wanted to show you what happens when you do this and both angle of view and focal length are intertwined so you move one the other one's going to change now be mindful that this only applies to the camera you created the ones that are existing in the camera besides the perspective camera those are orthographic cameras so when you create a new camera it's kind of like a perspective camera you can look through this move it around the minute now and so on but if you look through an orthography you can see it's always flat and orthographic speciality side cameras are really good for bouncing balls and basic assignments because you can really see the spacing and arcs and trajectory of your bouncing ball usually when you start with the bouncing ball orthographic cameras are the way to go now as you saw when you go into that menu create camera you do have a camera and aim so you can move around your camera like this but you do have this option here for the aim you also have a camera aim and up so you have this option again and at the same time you have this as well but generally I just go create camera and animate this now you can narrow it out and import an actual setup camera rig within Maya with the real world limitations or crane and all kinds of stuff but that will be covered in the other part of the series so with all of this when you're wondering well what should I concentrate on if you create a camera like I just showed a simple camera I would just worry about the FOV was the composition and potentially lighting if that's your thing and by composition I actually include camera movements as well I know composition within frame but there's a lot of power in how you move the camera camera moves another series so composition lenses and lighting will give you the best bang for the buck that's what I will concentrate on again lighting maybe not if you're just going for animation so your lens choices and your camera moves and the overall composition of the frame that's what I will concentrate on so as you move the camera away or to the object you have to think in terms of a very wide lens it's going to be establishing shot to more of a normal standard lens I mean kind of a portrait shot or if the object is far away and you kind of have a very long zoom it's a telephoto lens so roughly in a broad sense the bigger elements of your shot something wide something kind of normal something a bit more zoomed in now wide angle or telephoto lens that is going to change the field of view so a shorter focal length is going to give you a wider field of view when you use a wide lens this will give you more perspective there's more to see within the frame you can fit in more characters there's a bigger set that you can show off and if you get closer to camera can also have very dynamic actions like in the shot but with the wide lens if you get closer to the camera it's going to have certain distortions it's because the distance to the lens this that I'm using right here this is my Sony a64 with a 14 millimeter lens so if I go close you can see how much it changes you can see if I just move a little bit there's a lot of movement with my hands and also the perceived speed so if you have a wide lens and you do your acting shot and you move your head around that might be a lot faster than you intended because of that perspective chain and if your character has a big french nose and you move it around you're too close that might just give you too much of a distortion that kind of distracts from the shot but if you do a handheld kind of move with a wider lens there's just less jitter and less noise on the movement but if you go with a longer lens with a narrower field of view speaking of handheld and you zoom in it's going to inherit all the imperfections of where we're holding this whatever influence on the camera the jitter is going to be much more pronounced now with a longer lens you will see less of the frame it can't be more claustrophobic you can also feel a bit more detached it could be maybe like a journalistic camera kind of a documentary maybe you're too far away for what's going on you got to zoom in but the more you zoom the more it flattens the image which can give you a kind of a cool effect so if you have a very long lens and you have a character in frame and you're potentially surrounded by other creatures this might look very threatening and you can feel like this is just this big mountain of creatures attacking this character when in fact they're not that close so when you zoom out or change the lens you can see ah this is totally different the wider you go so think about that when you choose a lens you want to flatten that to make it a bit more oppressive and dangerous or you want to open it up and just give it a bit more air and obviously watch a ton of movies a lot of filmmakers have totally different approaches you can have movies with very long lenses and then you have other directors they go very very close this could be very close like a 12 to 14 or 21 to 27 and this will kind of distort your face but at the same time it will also feel more personal because you really feel that you are close to the character versus if you're really far away but you zoom into a face it will just feel potentially a bit more detached and a bit more neutral potentially so to go back to the Maya camera if you create a camera it's a 35 again you can debate on what does that mean 35 compared to my camera or a film camera but generally just watch out that standard camera if you do a close-up to an acting piece there's going to be some distortion the distance is going to be important it's going to potentially distract from just the lip sync that you want to present so maybe you're going to go on the 50 55 maybe you want to choose a longer lens to just kind of present that type of framing that is potentially less dynamic you can think about how close you get with the objects to the camera so if you have a 35 maybe don't gesture too much to camera don't have your character sitting and then getting up like this because then that will be a massive scale change in the head now in the film world there are some standards in terms of a medium shot a close-up or a wide but again that will be a different part in this series for composition and framing so generally you'd ask yourself when you create the shot with camera and the lens and the composition everything what is the feeling you want to convey to the audience so potentially go away from all the numbers and all the details and think about if I do this shot and this action is it going to be personal it's going to be more detached and neutral is it going to be dynamic and potentially think further so if you want to do something where the main character needs to be more personal maybe with a wider lens you're more up close but then if it switches to another character who's not the main character maybe then make that bit of a longer lens it's a bit flatter it's a bit more neutral so you have a clear lens distinction depending on what character is in frame so you can kind of switch up the importance and some people might not notice so it can be a bit more subconscious depending on how far you push and how obvious you want to do it and of course there's a lot more to think about so you got your shot composition as you think about the different lenses so then with the different lenses you also have different depth of field then think about if you have an establishing shot kind of a mid-shot close-up shot then in terms of composition you got the rule of thirds think about the perspective leading lines and this and much more will be in the upcoming parts in the series including dolly zooms with a show before but dolly zooms that to me is part of camera movement that's a separate part just about movement but there will also be things that will not address like lens breathing that exists but to me it's annoying it's distracting it's not really something I personally that I had to incorporate in any of my work and you would think that you want to avoid that but it does exist so there are things that I can briefly mention like now but I'm not going to go into topic feel free to google lens breathing and maybe leave a comment maybe you did this maybe you at work or somewhere had to replicate lens breathing in CG I'm very curious maybe you have an example that you did drop a comment I'm very curious and that will cover lenses for now again there's a lot more to cover in combination with lenses but I want to leave you with that general topic choose your lenses wisely think about the feeling think about how your shot changes depending on your lens choice and the distance of the character to the camera and play with it have fun make it super dynamic make it super long flatten that image for something a bit more interesting like a show before and speaking of interesting if this on my segue if this was interesting and you want me to work with you on your shots we incorporate animation but also camera stuff into your shot I have workshops they're always open you can sign up at any time link in the description with all of the information and if you don't want to miss all the upcoming parts anything else that I upload feel free to subscribe and hit that bell button comments are open any comments about this any questions feel free to let me know other than that that's it for me thank you for watching I'll see you next week