humancamera - J. Roche Workshop

The Human Camera

A Workshop for Chicago Zinefest 2018

For last year's Chicago Zinefest, I designed and taught an all-ages, interactive workshop to teach participants about how to improve their visual storytelling by thinking critically about camera angle: or, how changing the framing of an image changes its mood and meaning.

First, I introduced some terms and showed example movie stills and comics panels on the projector. Then I cast volunteers in a short script I had prepared. Several more volunteers were the directors—each used a black foamcore board with a cutout to frame each scene. The catch, to encourage experimentation, was that each director had to frame the shot from a different spot, name their shot type (ex. wide up-shot), and explain why they chose it. Half-way through, there was an opportunity to swap rolls so that everyone had a chance to participate.

The directors frame a shot of Alex, who played the role of The Mothman. photo: Alen Epstein

Here are the slides I projected on the screen. I broke down the script into shots (or comics panels) so we could focus on one scene at a time, and so that the non-participating audience wouldn't read ahead and get bored.

Why I chose this project: I think that this workshop shows how I solve problems. The brief from Zinefest was: design and teach an hour-long workshop. It had to be for all-ages and it was expected to be related to comics. If there was a budget, it was so small as to escape my memory. I set the learning objective, which was to teach comics readers and makers about camera angles in a way that would be engaging for participants of any age or experience level.