Change Your POV: Camera Angles & Shots that Tell a Story

1. ChangeYourPOV Intro: Hey, everyone. Welcome to change your point of view or change your POV camera angles and shots to tell a story. This is a fun class because it's something that makes you think outside the box. When you're creating anything in books, in particular, say, a children's book, a lot of times when we create AI or drawings, we just look at the same picture over and over again from the straight on view. One camera shot straight at the camera and nothing changes. My goal for this class is to teach you a little bit more about different angles, possibly worm view over the shoulder, bird's eye view, extreme wide shot, extreme close up, extreme close up, extreme wide shot. We go back and I can't do bird's eye because it's one camera right here, but you get the idea. This is a fun class because you're going to learn something that's going to take you not only into your books, but also into film, into your advertisements, whatever else you're creating in your studio. This is a beginning class, but I also use it to create some of my other courses on bookmaking. And so it's a great prerequisite for those classes, and I look forward to seeing you inside. Now, for the project, it's pretty simple. All I'm going to ask you is you take an image that you created yourself, take the original image. That's a straight shot, and I'm going to ask you to create maybe a bird's eye, extreme close up, extreme wide shot, Worm view, long shot, whatever you want. Also, you'll have inside a worksheet, PDF that gives you ten of the most popular camera angles and shots. We're going to teach you the difference between a POV point of view, what the protagonists or antagonists sees, as well as what the camera sees. And it's quite a big difference, and I think it's going to help you a lot in all of your other design projects. So I look forward to seeing you, and we'll talk more about the project a little bit later. Come on in and have a lot of fun with me. Thank you. 2. ChoosingYourShots: Okay, everybody, we're here in the first video, and what I wanted to show you was the storyboard that was created for me by ChatGPT, and it was based on a small little the name of this book is I Can Do This. And this is my main character, Isabella. And it went ahead, and I'm not going to discuss how I created the storyboard or how I created the character sheets that I'm going to show you. That's a different video, but I did want to show you what a typical storyboard looks like. Now, storyboards can look all different ways. They can have the text underneath with the images dominant. But in this case, this is what it created for me. The one thing I will note that when you're doing a storyboard, it's great to do this little numbered panel because it's so much easier when you go to create your images if you have numbered panels, you can just say create panel number one, create number five, create number nine, and it just knows because it sees it. But if you look at the the first five images, it's all straight on, right? Straight on, straight on, straight on, all across the board. This one is from behind. And then we also have the next four, five, six are straight on. This other ones we call that over the shoulder and then again straight on, and then these are the kids running away at the end. So my goal is when I see this, I want to become an art director. I want to say, I want to think like an art director or even like a film director. I want to make sure that the scenes are interesting. So this is what I did. When I create the book, I have the storyboard here. I want to make sure that I have a solid individual image before this is even created. We have one image of our main character who is Isabella, and that is escape out of here. You'll see that. And that's this one. I took that. And then I create a simple character sheet. Now, there are two different um two different things here. This is called a character sheet. This is what I strongly recommend you use. Why? Because it gives AI the most possible information about your character. First of all, standing up sideways. The only thing I would add here is probably a three quarter view in addition and then the back. So we know exactly what the AI can pick up exactly what she looks like, what she's wearing, and then a close up or extreme close up of the character in different expressions. And this is the ideal character sheet. You might see other character sheets they call character design sheets, and a character design sheet is a little bit different in that it gives more information. But in my opinion, it confuses the AI. It just gives out too much information. So in this case, it's got a lot more poses, expressions. Here's a better. This is actually a better turnaround right here. It's not an extreme close up though. It's a long shot, pretty much. But it also gives the personality of the character. It gives the color palette, and it gives even finer details about the tail, the patterns on the giraffe. If it's a person, they might have, say, a belt or if it's a police officer might have a holster or a whistle or a baton or something like that, that you want them to see that, right? So, in my opinion, what you should do if you have a highly illustrated character, include the character sheet and the character design sheet so that you have all that information that the AI can access. Now, getting back to our main video here, and also, by the way, you'll be receiving this PDF. It's the ten most popular camera angles in when to use them. In my examples, I use Isabella, but you can see here, for instance, the different types of expressions that you would use different emotions that you would use for each shot. But we go back to our book. What I did is I just said, Okay, create image of panel one. And so here is the first image. That's what was created. And that was created from that tiny little storyboard that is really usually a low res, and I don't even have to tell it at this point that I want high res image or that I want square because it knows that's primarily what I work with. I primarily work 8.5 by 8.5 ". And so it's set that up already. But if you're doing books, let's say, you're doing a vertical book, six by nine, then you should tell it that you want an image in the six by nine, especially if you're doing an eBook, for instance, I would do that. I would set that up in advance because you don't want to have to worry about doing this later on. You want them to set it up for you as you go. Now, I don't have the image here, but I did change the perspective of this or the point of view as an over the shoulder, and I will show that to you later. I don't have it right here off the top of my actually, you know what I could show you in Canva. I'll show you at the end of class. This did change, and what I liked about is when it changed. This little pop out here was on the phone so you no longer needed the pop out, and you saw exactly what she saw. And we call that point of view, right? You see exactly what she saw. What we see is over her shoulder, and I'll show you that a little bit later. So then I went create Panel two, and I looked at it, and I said, Okay, do I need to make this different? What do you guys think? Is there some way that we can make this different? We could do over the shoulder again. We could do Bird's Eye view. It depends on what you're trying to do. I actually thought it was okay. But I liked about this image, first of all, it shows a little bit of the context of what the house that she lives in, right? That's to the left of the picture, the house she lives in and then where she's going, right? She's going outside. So I think this really worked because if you look at it in thirds and we go thirds vertically, you have where she's been, where she is, and where she's going, and it works perfectly. And I think the perspective of all the shots really works great. We might call this a medium shot, or we might call it a long shot because it's including the entire portrait of the person. Now, camera three, I had it change. If you go back to the original image share for image three pop that back up here. This was three. She had to make a decision. Now, the thing that I didn't like about this is all you see is park 2.5 miles. If you know anything about simple storytelling, you want your subject. You want what the subject wants, right, the desire. And then they have to make a decision. Do they walk or do they take the bus? Those are the two decisions in my story. And so I thought it just didn't didn't really pop for what I really wanted to convey. So now we're going to go back to here. And here, it seemed like a daunting, right? We got that bird's eye view, and it really it's really I think it's more powerful this way because she's really contemplating, Wow, I have to walk 2.5 miles. You know, that's a big decision I have to make. If I don't make it, I'm going to be so dead tired by the time she gets there. And so that's what I was trying to convey here. You could do anything you wanted to if you wanted. You could do extreme shot to show more of um, where she is or maybe the road ahead of her. In fact, later on, I might be the next image, actually. I do do that, I'm going to show you that in a second. So panel four has no changes. She's contemplating the bus. You can kind of see it. The only thing I think I would want to change here, we can still do this. We could do her, um maybe having her turned around and waving for the bus or thinking more about the bus because the bus isn't even in a review here. And so it doesn't really work here. In fact, at the end of all this, I will change a couple of images, and we can work on that together. How's that? Next video, how's that? We'll do that the next video. We'll do some changes, okay? Let's move on to panel five. Now, here's where it didn't change it either. Here is where she's got to make a decision, right? Does she take the bus? Maybe she takes the wrong bus. What happens then? She's going to end up on the other side of town. Or will she get lost walking there, right? She's got all these crazy decisions in her head, and she doesn't know which way to turn. And so I like this graphic a lot. I didn't instruct this graphic at all, by the way. It just did it for me. And by the way, this is based on the script that was given to Chachi PT to create the storyboard. Then we go into this was the one I wanted. If you look this is panel six. I wanted. Does anybody know what this is? XWSOTS. Look how simple that prompt is. Very simple. But the ChatGPT knew exactly what it was. And by the way, look at the number of seconds that took only not even a minute, and that was the daunting where she had to go, Oh, my gosh, that was so long. It really shows how far everything is. We did an extreme wide shot, which is XWS and OTS over the shoulder. So that really gave you or the reader Um, how daunting that is, and I think that helps sway her make the decision that she actually ended up doing. Here she sees that the park is only three stops away, and I think that helped ease her decision making when she realized that it'd be so much easier just to take the bus, it's closer than she thought. Now, for this one, I called it 7.5 just because let's take a look. This is Okay, this is seven. And then here I said, can we make it so she has taking a deep breath, right? When we do make a decision, usually to calm ourselves down, we take a deep breath, and that's what I was trying to convey here. And I think this one nailed it perfectly, and she's taking your deep breath before she makes her decision. And then here, I said, Okay, I want a view of her hands on her waist. I want her to be shown in a power stance, and that's exactly what I got. Although this isn't a worm view, which I think I do have. Yeah, here we go. So this is a great view, but I really wanted even more emphasis. And what I did decide to do is I went for worm Vew right? Worm view is a great view because it shoots up. The feet are huge. It looks like a more powerful. All these angles are moving towards the middle here, in like a tent here, it's really powerful. It's a very powerful shot, and we use Worm view to show that power to show that she's bigger than life, right? And I love this because you can actually see underneath her shoe, which is really cool. So that's Worm view, and it even told me, Worm What did I say it here? I just said, Can you give me an alternate view of panel eight of Worm view or low angle looking up? I want to show her as being powerful. It says here, giving Isabella a powerful, heroic presence. All right? Alright. Now, if we go back to the beginning and we look at nine, I took some Liberty see. Nine was she was coming onto the bus Isabella steps into the bus. This one, by itself isn't bad. It's good. We see the bus driver, and she's seeing. But I thought, wouldn't it be kind of cool if we saw both perspectives? What does heat see and what does she see? And so that's what I kind of did here when I created the next scene. And so here, it's her point of view. What is she seeing? Now, I'm going to stop this video for a second. Can you see something wrong with this video? To me, it was blatant. I'm going to give you 5 seconds to see if you can figure it out. Alright, give up. Anybody know? Look where his eyes are going. His eyes are going actually above her head way over here, as if he's looking beyond her. And so I asked ChachiPT. Can we fix that? So it looks more like he is looking at her? Now, this is better, but he still looks like he's looking over to her left. I wish she was looking more. I still might fix this. This has not been published yet. I still may fix this to go a little bit closer here to get the viewpoint here. But I did like this shot a lot. And then we did a switch here, and it's kind of like the original one, but it was supposed to be over his shoulder. I didn't come out as planned, but still it came out really, really well. And so that's the next shot. We call that a two shot when the two people are talking to each other. 3. Fixing the Bus Driver: We're looking at his gaze, right? This is the one that we were thinking about that looked, where is it now? This one. This is the fix of the original image. I'm not going to open this because every time I open it, I get thrown into a different page. Are we happy with this? Can we live with this? Yes or no? There's like three things I could fix on this page. His gaze is okay, it's not perfect. He's really not looking at her. He should be looking this way. Looks like he's looking up this way. Two other little fixes we could do is this extra little bar here doesn't really belong. I've already tried to edit it. Using the edit feature, I didn't work, so I'm not going to show you that. And then the only other thing that stands out is the orientation of this steering wheel. Steering wheel looks like it's facing this way and his chair is facing that way. So this is a little thing. Most people won't pick up on it, but I'd rather make it look better. So what I went ahead and did is we looked at getting a reference image. I went on pexels.com, PEX ELS, where they have royalty free, copyright free images, and I did a screenshot of this bus driver, and it was much better than the old one. If I go back here real quick, you can see it. It's kind of tight. Steering wheel just doesn't work there, right? So we were able to go in, and it's much better. This one I'm willing to fix a little bit later. And then the gaze still, this one is not bad, but I'm okay to live with it. Alright? As you can see here, I tried to remove this image, but it didn't work. So I'm happy with this, and I still have the background or not the background, but the other image that we used before. So, for all intents purposes, I am okay with this. And like I said, I can always fix anything else if I don't want. In fact, in Canva, if I wanted to, I could even fix this little bar. I could remove this one, this one's kind of weird. If you think about it, this one is in the foreground. This one is in the background. And the way it looks looks like maybe her hands should be the other way around. I don't know. These are little nitpicky things that stand out to me, but we're just going to leave it as it is. 4. Fixing Perspectives: Okay, so, we're back in Chachi PT again, and one area we forgot to talk about, we talked about it briefly. Um, is the perspective of these children. The one here looks like they're a little bit too young. We talked about that briefly. Here you can see that she looks almost twice the size of them, and the kids their facial expressions, they look just too young. The other thing I notice too is the left hand is missing. Even if you follow it, if I blow it up right here, you can see this one looks like it's going behind her, which is okay. But this one the arm would be right here. So we would see it, right? We would see part of it there. So we're kind of missing that arm. The other thing I noticed too is they're both all three of them are in the same exact pose. Arms spread out, right foot forward, left foot back. And so I asked ChachiPt to change two things, not only the age and size of these three children, but also let's fix their rhythm. And so let's go back to that and we can see here that we did do successfully. We were able to get them so that they were bigger. There's the taller image. Of these kids, it makes more sense that they would be the kind of the same age as Isabella. And then what's missing now here is the arm. We want to change the rhythm of their feet. Let's see what we came up with. The boy in the middle his left arm is lost. Can you bring that to the front, change the running rhythm of the three children so they're not identical. And it picked up exactly what I wanted to do. It just did a great job. Here, her arms are spread out. H one is back, one is forward, different rhythm of their feet, which I love. And here, same thing. One is forward, the other one's back. I just picked it up perfectly. And so that's a great fix, and that's what I wanted to show. Now, that pretty much concludes the fixing. There's one other one that we could possibly fix, and it's not a biggie. But there's one scene where I show the extreme whiteout white shot where she's looking down the road and the cities and the distance, I could reverse that so that she's in the city, looking out at the park. That's the only thing that I still might fix for the final book. But I hope this is giving you some clarity on as far as what you have the choice to make, right? You're the director, but you still need that wisdom of being a designer of knowing the basics of design, right? And this, the fact that she's bleeding off of the image is okay as long as the text is not bleeding off or make sure that it's in the safe zone when you're building out these images. That's okay. And everything else looks really, really good. And that pretty much concludes our instructional part of this course. The next video, we're going to talk more about the project, and that's where we're going to head next. I'll see you in the project video. 5. Your Project Details: Well, congratulations on completing the course. I hope you got a lot out of it. It's a really interesting course and how to change your perspective, change the POV of what your camera sees, what your reader sees, to give it more interest. It's not just always a straight on shot because I think people get lazy and they just take what AI gives you. But here you have more control, you have more decision making skills and more leadership, as you continue moving forward in your design career. For the project, it's pretty simple. All I want you to do is take either an image that you've seen in the instruction that I've shown you or I much prefer you use your own imagery. That way you can see how things change. Most of the images you might get from AI are going to be straight on shots unless you specifically tell it in the prompting what you're looking for. That's another way to do this. For me, I was just talking conversationally to ChatGPT, and it gave me that storyboard. Now, you still have to create the images one at a time. But here's your chance to create a project of your own. Choose two to three images, changing the point of view of the original, show me the original view, and then maybe two additional shots Bird's eye, worm View, extreme wide shot over the shoulder, whatever you want to do. And I'd love to see that, make sure you put it, and I'll give you my feedback immediately, and I can't wait to see what you come up with. I hope you enjoy this class. Look for my other classes on bookmaking and filmmaking. I'll see you soon.