Perspective Start to Finish: Spying From the Rafters
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Sometimes we use funky perspectives just to shake things up, sometimes we do it to heighten dramatic tension. But sometimes we do it because there's no other way to fit in the information we need to in a panel.

Say for instance the script calls for a superheroine lurking in the rafters above a boxing match. One boxer is down for the count, the other is standing over him, the ref is counting, and the victorious boxer's coach is looking through the ropes all smug and self-satisfied. All of this while our black-garbed heroine spies on them, gathering clues about the fight-fixing ring. That's a hefty chunk of information to fit into one panel, but we can do it.

Know what the finished panel should look like? Me neither. It's time to start thinking with your pencil.

We start out with a sketch of what information we know. This isn't a thumbnail for the panel, it's a floorplan. It lays out what we know, and only needs to be detailed enough to take us to the next stage. In this floorplan, there's no perspective or foreshortening. The heroine in the rafters (A) is drawn the same size as the boxers below. Nothing has to be "right" here, we can fix anything later.

Now, let's not lose momentum. Next we need an elevation. An elevation is a side-view that, like the floor plan above, has no perspective or foreshortening. Kind of like blueprints. Again, we don't need detail, and we don't need everything to be right - we just need enough information to move on to the next stage.

So we really have three elements. The three people in the ring, the coach outside the ring, and our heroine far above it. For a single camera shot to catch all that, it needs to either be pulled way back in an extreme long shot, or it needs to be placed on or near a line that passes through all three of our elements.

This elevation doesn't quite work for that, so let's think a few things through. We can have the camera look up past the coach, past the people in the ring, way up into the rafters to our heroine. But our heroine will be awfully small, and hard to make out in the rafters. Plus this is her point of view in the story, let's try to share it. We'll put the camera behind her, looking down past her to the ring below. And in the ring, we want to see the coach's face, so he'll have to be somewhere on the opposite side of the ring from the heroine (and more importantly, the camera). Everyone else we just need enough body language to know what they're doing.

So I'm going to do another elevation. If I shoot a camera down from the heroine on that first elevation, I'm going to be straight down on the people in the ring, which isn't that interesting. If I move her over to the side, we get to look at them from an angle. I'll also swap the ref and the victorious boxer, so the coach is closer to the champ in the panel, emphasizing their connection.

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