Shot types (normative)#

How the camera’s shot value determines the scale of a figure in the panel.

The unit: head-heights#

Figures are measured in head-heights, the standard figure-drawing unit. An adult is conventionally about 7.5 heads tall. Every puppet declares units_per_head and a set of vertical landmarks measured downward from head_top, so the compiler can reason about anatomy without knowing anything about the artwork.

Why not “60% of panel height”#

A tempting shortcut is to define each shot as a fixed fraction of panel height. It is wrong, because what a shot type actually names is where the frame cuts the body — the waist, the chest, the shoulders. The fraction of the panel that a figure then occupies falls out of that crop, and differs between a child and an adult, or between a standing and a seated pose. Encoding the fraction instead of the crop line bakes in one body and one pose.

So a shot type is defined by two things: a crop landmark, and a headroom fraction — the empty space above the head that stops the figure colliding with the top edge.

Resolution#

visible_height_native = landmark[crop].y - landmark[head_top].y
available_height      = panel_height * (1 - headroom - footroom)
scale                 = available_height / visible_height_native

The scaled figure is then anchored so its crop line meets the bottom of the available area. footroom defaults to 0.0; a panel may raise it to lift figures off the lower edge.

This anchoring rule is right whenever the crop landmark sits at the edge of what the shot frames – feet at the bottom of a long shot, chin at the bottom of a big close-up. It goes wrong at the one rung where the landmark sits inside the thing being framed: extreme_close_up crops at eyes, and bottom-anchoring the eyes puts the whole eye region below the panel, framing forehead and eyebrows instead. Headroom cannot fix this – it shifts the figure down and shrinks it by exactly the same amount, so the crop line stays pinned to panel_height * (1 - footroom) regardless of headroom. Footroom is the only lever that moves a crop line up from the bottom edge, which is why extreme_close_up is the one shot in the table that needs it despite showing no feet.

Table#

`shot`	Crop landmark	Headroom	Footroom	Reads as
`long_shot` (alias `wide`)	`feet`	0.28	0.10	Figure small in its environment
`full_shot`	`feet`	0.05	0.04	Whole body, environment secondary
`medium_full`	`knees`	0.08	—	The three-quarter shot
`cowboy`	`mid_thigh`	0.08	—	Stance and confrontation
`medium_shot`	`waist`	0.10	—	The conversational default
`medium_close_up`	`chest`	0.10	—	Emphasis on the speaker
`close_up`	`shoulders`	0.08	—	Emotion; face dominates
`big_close_up`	`chin`	0.05	—	Intensity
`extreme_close_up`	`eyes`	0.00	0.45	Crops through the face deliberately

wide is an exact synonym for long_shot. The two are used interchangeably in the literature and the language keeps both because writers reach for both.

medium_full and cowboy are not synonyms, though they were briefly implemented as though they were. Medium full — the three-quarter shot — cuts at the knees. The cowboy or American shot cuts at mid-thigh, a framing that comes from 1930s Westerns needing the holster in shot. Naming two shots and drawing one collapses a rung of the ladder, and nothing about the output makes that visible.

Footroom is space left below the crop line. For the two shots that show feet, that space reads as ground, and it is not decoration. The crop lands the feet landmark on the frame edge, but the drawing continues past it: the ankle joint sits exactly on that landmark and the shin is drawn as a round-capped stroke, so half its width falls below. Without footroom a long shot clipped the feet by nine panel units — the one thing a long shot is defined by not doing. It is also compositionally right on its own: a figure standing on the exact bottom edge reads as falling out of the panel rather than standing on anything.

extreme_close_up uses footroom for a different reason: its crop landmark (eyes) is inside the face rather than at its edge, and footroom is the only lever that moves a crop line up off the bottom edge — see Resolution, above.

The table is monotonic: reading down it, the figure never gets smaller. That is what makes it a ladder, and it is enforced by a test rather than left to inspection — long_shot and full_shot crop at the same landmark, so only headroom separates them, and having those two the wrong way round inverted the ladder at its widest end without anything noticing.

long_shot and full_shot crop at the same landmark, so headroom and footroom are all that separate them. Until the setting layer existed the gap between them had to stay modest: with nothing behind the figure, air is just white, and a small figure alone on a page reads as a full shot with a generous margin rather than as a long shot. Now the air is the environment — which is what a long shot is about — so the gap is a real rung, and a long shot frames the figure at roughly two thirds the size a full shot does.

Angle#

angle selects where the eye-line sits vertically within the panel:

`angle`	Eye-line	Effect
`low`	Lower third	Figure looms; viewer looks up
`eye_level`	Upper third	Neutral (default)
`high`	Upper edge	Figure diminished; viewer looks down

Current limitation: angle shifts the eye-line only. It does not yet apply true perspective projection or foreshortening, so extreme angles will read as vertical repositioning rather than as a genuine change of viewpoint. This is a known gap, not an oversight.