VARIATION: VOLUME CHOREOGRAPHY

I’ve been learning more at work about taking variation into consideration for shot imporvements. I wanted to learn more about this while still continuing my volume studies. So I decided to study smoke emission choreography. Star Wars provided great study material.

Let’s start with The Empire Strikes Back. Focus on the smoke dispersion pattern on the ship. It keeps the background active and breathes life and realism into the scene. But more importantly, there is time offsetting between the two emitters. This variation keeps the pattern from feeling too repetitive and predictable.

Above was an example with 2 smoke emitters, but how could variation be added with 4 emitters. To find an answer, I looked at the top left lens flares from a shot from The Force Awakens where there are two types of variation. This first is change in the strength of the flare change over the shot. The second is the most important: none of the 4 edge flares exit frame at the same time. This is use of overlapping animation to add variation.

This overlapping animation is shown in Return of the Jedi. All 4 of the exhaust ports fire at different times. Even though there is a predicable overall pattern, adding another layer of variation makes the motion more organic and less repetitive.

The final example from The Empire Strikes Back incorporates variation found in the past examples, and a few new ones:

Variation in dispersion: Constant and rhythmic

Variation in direction: up and down

Variation in size: Large, small, thin, wide

Variation in color: Orange and blue

Variation in depth: FG (in first shot), MG and BG

I want to call particular attention to the two, large down-flowing plumes of smoke on screen right and left in the second shot. The smoke emitting on screen left is dispersed in a pattern so not to fully obstruct the center of interest (the heroes). The smoke screen right is constant and is obstructing a non-important part of the shot. The only constant smoke over our heroes is up to their waists, but there is still enough negative space to view their forms.

That concludes my short study on smoke choreography! I wasn’t expecting to learn as much as I did from these few clips, but I’m even more excited to seek out new examples and learn as much as I can.