Cameras and speech/narration

Should I even bother with a lot of camera movements if I have two characters having a dialog?

I have 43 Cinematic Transmissions, a conversation between our protagonist and a secondary character.

I tried having two cameras bouncing back and forth from each units perspective, however even though I know the story trying to read the words my attention is still drawn to the camera movements meaning I lose out on parts of the conversation.

This is an issue I have had on several maps.

What is your particular wisdom when it comes to dialog - ignore the dialog and put in a lot of camera movements or "settle" on one or two camera changes during a lengthy informative conversation?

Or is there a third alternative?

43 transmissions? You need to clean and polish that up or your audience will die of boredom.

As for the attention problems, you can solve that by using proper subtitles (the ones inside the main view, as opposed to Blizzard's silly subtitles that are in a seperate window at the bottom of the screen) and of course with voice acting. The only thing that is worse than 43 transmissions in a row is 43 transmissions in a row while the camera hardly moves at all.

So your saying people hate to read?



Unfortunately the information is needed. I guess I could cut out the joke and reduce it to 41 transmissions.

Mind a majority of the transmissions are in groups of 2 to 5 of one character speaking then the other.

I do like the idea of cinematic sequence outside of the bottom screen.

Unless you want to be a voice actor with me?

I recently did a big one like this (for a real map, though).

What I have is the camera zooming very very slowly in from a certain angle; however, after a certain number of transmissions (ie at logical points in the dialogue) it fades out and changes to another angle; then slowly zooms in again etc etc etc.

Breaks it up just enough, I think.

don't have the camera move around all the time, if theres something that needs to be shown, move the camera to it other wise just do a couple different angles. and don't forget to make sure its skipable.