Hey guys, and welcome to another Episode tutorial with me, Joseph Evans, author of The Seckry Sequence books, The Phoenix Prophecy,...
Hey guys, and welcome to another Episode tutorial with me, Joseph Evans, author of The Seckry Sequence books, The Phoenix Prophecy, The Ember Effect, Soulbound, and The Secret of Rain on Episode!
Today I’m going to be showing you how to correctly use zones in your stories. For this tutorial I’m going to use the Romantic Lakeside background, which is this one right here.
As you can see, it’s quite a wide one, which means that we have a total of 4 zones to work with.
Let’s go back to our script and have a character enter from left to screen center in the first zone.
Now what happens when you don’t specify a zone is that it will automatically default to zone 1, which is the furthest zone on the left of the background - this one right here with the picnic.
So lets have Eiya enter from left to screen center in our default zone.
Now what you might want to do when a character enters a new scene for the first time is have the camera pan all the way to the opposite side of the background and back again so that the reader can see and appreciate the scene just like the character would be doing.
To do this we’re gonna need to use the pan command.
So you want to write @pan to zone 4, which is the furthest zone to the right, then we probably want to write @pause for a beat here so that the camera stops for a brief moment. Then we’re gonna write @pan to zone 1, which will bring the camera back to where we started.
So let’s just show you what that looks like.
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Okay, so as you can see, the camera moves quite fast, which is useful in some situations, but not in others. Because my scene is supposed to be a romantic one, a fast moving camera seems a little out of place with the tone of the setting, so it would be much nicer to slow it down.
If you want to have a slower moving camera, here’s how to do it.
Instead of writing @pan to zone 4, we need to have our camera pan to each zone individually, so it’s gonna be @pan to zone 2, then on a separate line @pan to zone 3, then @pan to zone 4. We’ll pause for a beat again, and then just do the reverse. So @pan to zone 3, @pan to zone 2, @pan to zone 1.
And here’s what that looks like.
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Another thing you’ll probably want to do in your story is have your character walk from one side of a background to the other. Now, if we simply wrote @EIYA walks to screen center in zone 4, she would indeed do this, but our camera would stay stuck on zone 1, and it would look like Eiya is simply walking offscreen. To have the camera follow her while she’s walking, we’re going to need to use the @follow command.
Here’s how you write it.
@follow, in lowercase letters, your character’s name, to screen center, or whichever position you like, in, and then the zone that you want them to walk to, so zone 4.
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Okay, another thing you’ll probably want to do is cut straight to another zone without panning to it.
So now that we have Eiya standing in zone 4, I’m going to cut back to zone 1 to have Seckry enter the scene.
To do this, all I’m gonna need to write is @cut to zone 1
@SECKRY enters from left to screen left
Alright, so here’s what that cut looks like.
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Okay, the only other thing you might want to do with zones is have your characters walk from foreground positions to background positions, and vice versa, and have the camera follow them while they do this. So as an example, I’m gonna have Seckry walk to back far left in zone 2 and Eiya walk to back right in zone 2.
So it’s @follow SECKRY to back far left in zone 2
And then I’m gonna cut to Eiya’s zone.
And then it’s @follow EIYA to back right in zone 2
Here’s what that looks like.
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Okay guys, that is pretty much all you need to know about zones. All you need to remember are those 3 important commands, which are pan, follow, and cut. If you have any questions about any of this, please do comment them down below, and if you see any questions in the comments that YOU know the answer to, it would be awesome if you helped out fellow writers by giving them an answer, I know a load of you have been doing this and it’s really fantastic that we have such a helpful community. If this video has helped you with your story, please do subscribe to my channel, it would be a massive help to me, I hope it has helped. Thanks very much for watching, folks, and I will see you all in the next video!
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