Stand on your mark (question about directing)

[duanemoody]

In my current project I have several scenes with one character where the character is not centered horizontally. My sprite artist says it's customary in VNs to center the character unless other characters are about to enter the scene.

My instinct tells me doing this is telegraphing to the player when other characters are going to enter the scene.

The current demo does it the way the artist suggested; an older demo shows how I was doing it previously.

I could use some feedback on what other directors think about this.

[pinkmouse]

(I can't look at your demos because I'm on a reaaally slow dial-up, so please forgive if I'm missing the point.)

What's the problem with telegraphing to the player that a new character is arriving? VNs aren't real-time, so reflex times aren't an issue.

Otherwise, you could center your character while the dialog with them is happening, and then when character B arrives, move character A over to the other side of the screen.

[Voight-Kampff]

Personally?

Why think in terms of, "This is the way VNs are traditionally done"?

I'm more apt to think of VNs like film. When you get down to it, a VN can actually come off looking a bit like an animatic for a movie. So why not "film" that way? We are talking about a *Visual* Novel, right? Wouldn't it make sense to make it as visually interesting and stimulating as possible? Especially when you consider how little art resources are typically available for a VN.

I'd love to see more titles with lots of panning, zooming, parallax scrolling, etc. Well...not just for the sake of showing off. But if it fits the scene, why not use more tricks like that?

[duanemoody]

What's the problem with telegraphing to the player that a new character is arriving?

Completely removing the element of surprise, mainly.

Otherwise, you could center your character while the dialog with them is happening, and then when character B arrives, move character A over to the other side of the screen.

My problem with this is that it feels like I'm implying to the player that the setting is physically cramped.

[sake-bento]

What's the problem with telegraphing to the player that a new character is arriving?

Completely removing the element of surprise, mainly.

How much surprise do you need? If you're holding a normal conversation, and someone else approaches, it's only natural to sense them coming. The person you're talking with will naturally look up or move to the side to make room, thus hinting that someone else is arriving. If you're being attacked from behind or otherwise surprised, I think it's fine to remove the other character sprite completely and just focus on the intruding newcomer.

One scenario that seems to work okay is having the character speak before the sprite shows on the screen. Something like:

Code: Select all

protagonist "I hate this!"

friend "Hate what?"

show friend

protagonist "Oh, I didn't see you there."

[Jake]

Completely removing the element of surprise, mainly.

I would disagree, for two reasons.

Firstly: the problem isn't necessarily anything to do with surprise, as often surprise isn't important; the problem is to do with expectation and formula and stuff like that.

Consider the old storytelling axiom: if you show a gun in the first act, you have to fire it by the third. This is largely because of audience expectation. It's perfectly acceptable to have wallpaper, standard lamps and framed paintings in the room because the audience by and large expects them never to be involved in anything interesting, they just stand there decorating the room. A gun, on the other hand, is expected to be fired... you put it in the story and every reader who notices it will be waiting for someone to be shot, part of their subconscious devoted to thinking about that gun that hasn't been used yet.

So, if you make it a hard and fast rule that your characters stand in the centre of the scene unless another character is going to enter, in which case they stand to the side, then... well, the audience will notice. And every time you have a character standing to one side, they're going to expect a second character, no matter how long it takes. And thus, the whole time between the first character appearing [to one side] and the second character appearing and fulfilling the expectation, they're going to be a bit distracted, not paying proper attention to the dialogue and narration and whatever, because part of their brain is thinking "how does this get a second character onto the screen?". So if you do this, you're constraining yourself to not have any characters show up mid-scene, because if you have anything important happen before they do there's the possiblity that your reader won't take it in properly because they're distracted.

(Now, it's not really all that drastic, most likely people will pick up on big plot points and the distraction is more of an irritation than actually impeding the story... but the mere fact that it's noticable and it will register on a conscious level with some readers means that it's a bad thing and should be avoided, IMO.)




Secondly, there are conventions which are conventions for a good reason (like most plot structure conventions) and there are conventions which are there for no good reason. Many, like this one, are probably artefacts of poorly-written VN engines where - for example - it wasn't so plausible to move people around the scene and they needed to leave space for new characters because they couldn't make it later. If your scene works better with a character off to one side, don't compromise it just because some Japanese guy a decade and a half ago was too lazy or short on time to write a better engine for his VN.

[uluuu]

To be honest, it kind of bothers me when characters are always centered. It seems unnatural, like the character being shown is standing way too close to the POV character.

[mduffor]

Personally, I'd say go ahead and move your sprites off-center for composition purposes, if for no other reason. Straight-ahead, subject-centered compositions aren't all that interesting. If your background image is staged such that visually interesting elements are on the right half of the image, go ahead and put your character on the left side. If you are having a back-and-forth dialog between two characters, put them on their respective sides of the frame. Heck, you could even do an "over the shoulder" back and forth between characters with different BG images showing opposite sides of the same location (as long as the BG images are visually tied together so it doesn't look like your characters are teleporting.)

I'm working on an engine for a VN/sim game right now, and when I get to the art and staging of characters, I plan to try and go off the deep end as far as cinematic composition goes. I hope to use close ups, medium shots, over the shoulder shots, profiles... you name it. It will up the art requirements a bit, but hopefully it will open up the use of filmic language so I have one more directorial tool at my disposal.

Cheers,
Michael