My “False Horizon” Mistake

Looking over my old perspective notes, I caught myself making a minor mistake. In the first set of drawings below, you can see “Cartoon Thomas” driving uphill in his little 4 cylinder “shoe car” (so called because a friend, after too many beers, said to me, “Dude, your car looks like a shoe.”) The second drawing shows the street from Cartoon Thomas’ point of view.

Next we have Cartoon Thomas zooming downhill, followed by his view of the street.

I made these drawings while studying Andrew Loomis’ book Successful Drawing, and I was trying to apply his idea of “false horizon”. In his book, Loomis correctly draws streets converging to a “false horizon” above or below the actual horizon. My intention was to show that the actual horizon was at Cartoon Thomas’ eye level, while the streets converge to a “false horizon”. However, I drew Cartoon Thomas looking up or down along the street, so that the “direction of view” is parallel with the incline of the street. In other words, it’s like a camera tilting upward or downward (see diagram below). In this scenario, if the “direction of view” tilts up or down, the environment would shift into 2pt-vertical perspective (like the examples on the lower left side below).

Minor mistake, it’s not a big deal. I probably could have just left out “direction of view” altogether and focused on the inclined planes - then everything would be more or less correct, but little mistakes like this just bother me.

BTW… the “shoe car” survived almost 180k miles (even taking me across the U.S. from Florida to California), before it began to fall apart. I miss my old shoe.

Futurama: Drawing an Environment from Multiple Angles

Here is a typical scenario for an animation layout artist: drawing the same environment from multiple camera angles. Below are three of my drawings from Futurama. The first one is a high angle down shot in three-point perspective.

The second shot is a one-point perspective view with a low horizon line.

The third shot is a two-point perspective view (with one vanishing point inside the picture frame), zooming in closer on the dumpster.

It’s been so long ago, that I can’t remember which episode this was, or even what the characters were doing exactly (I think somebody was digging in the dumpster, but I'm not sure - I do remember that the production deadlines were so tight that I was living on too much caffeine and too little sleep, and the rest is a fog). However, these backgrounds represent a typical pattern in filmmaking: an establishing shot, followed by medium shot, and then close-up. 

• Establishing Shot: composition would emphasize environment over characters
• Medium Shot: emphasis might be roughly divided between characters and environment
• Closeup: composition would emphasize characters over environment  

The high-angle shot establishes the setting, and would show the positions of characters within the scene. The medium shot brings us down to the level of the characters, helping the audience connect with the character acting/story. Finally, a closeup brings us right up to the characters, emphasizing acting and emotional impact. (I really wish now that I had saved the character poses for these shots, but regrettably I only Xeroxed my backgrounds.) 

Before so much Los Angeles animation production was shipped overseas, an animator/character layout artist would focus on the character acting, while the background layout artist focused on developing the environments. The main challenge for the background layout artist was to keep the proportions and environment design (including all the details) consistent from shot to shot, while applying credible perspective. Looking at these so many years later, I think my proportions are a bit off on the dumpster and the crates (but hopefully animated cartoons are somewhat forgiving).

In one of the perspective classes I taught at AAU, students were assigned to draw the same environment or subject from multiple camera angles. I think this is a great exercise, because it helps you develop your eye for proportions, and really think about the structure and design of the environment. And of course, you can’t get away with hiding stuff in the background by overlapping it with a foreground shape - that might work for one shot, but probably not the rest.

AAU Ellipse Policy

One of my dubious claims to fame was authoring the Academy of Art "Ellipse Policy" for the Foundations perspective class.