Not Thriving: Camera Tricks

Several pages on the Camera Tricks index lack wicks and examples. More specifically, these are listed on Pages Needing Wicks under below 12:

• Camera Chase
• Dolly (no examples)
• Framed Subject (no examples)
• Head Cam (no examples)
• Pedestal (no examples)
• Split Diopter (no examples with context)
• Wet-for-Dry

And these aren't much better, in the below 24 category:

• Cucoloris (I know it had a TRS thread and we agreed to reconsider deletion/sending back to TLP in April 2022 if it still can't reach 24 wicks by then)
• Split Edit
• Transition Track
• Visual Novel Shot

And I'd like to do something like what we did with Forum Speak and Logical Fallacies - vote for which ones are in too poor condition and definition-only merge them onto a UsefulNotes/ page. If they are not merged, someone should TLP them instead.

Edited by Piterpicher on Jun 13th 2022 at 10:10:51 AM

Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)

Opened. Handling this like Forum Speak and UsefulNotes.Logical Fallacies sounds good.

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

Not sure if UN is the right place to put these. After all, either camera tricks are tropes or they are not. Having half of them as UN and the other half as trope pages would be inconsistent. I would rather merge stumps onto the main Camera Tricks page.

Aren't these all just production trivia? We can make them def-only or UN or combine together, it's just information that nobody pays attention to.

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

Yeah, no. Camera tricks are storytelling devices, they are tropes. People don't notice them easily and that's why these pages are so underdeveloped, but they are tropes all the same. They have nothing lost on Useful Notes.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

I neglected to mention that I was against moving them to Useful Notes, but my reference to UsefulNotes.Logical Fallacies (which came out of an effort to trim Main.Logical Fallacies' subtropes) might have made that unclear. I would be fine with making at least some of these pages definition-only, but not Useful Notes.

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

Def-only sounds good.

TRS Queue | Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper Wall

Agreed, def-only sounds like a good idea to me.

Vehicle-Based Characterization | Grief-Induced Split | Locker Mail

Should we evaluate which tropes should be def-only, if not all of them?

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

Tbh, all of them can be def-only.

I'll second making them all def only.

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Thirded.

Vehicle-Based Characterization | Grief-Induced Split | Locker Mail

I beg to differ a bit. That these tropes have few examples is mostly because it's hard to notice camera moves. That does not mean that examples are bad by default or require that we disallow them altogether.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Wet-for-Dry appears to be trivia. Camera Chase has the 2000s-snark but (in theory) examples should be easy to observe and document.

I'd argue that many of the entries on that index are not tropes, since they have no set narrative meaning. Instead, they can be used to help convey multiple different things. Of those listed in the OP, only Visual Novel Shot unequivocally has a narrative meaning. Camera Chase is framed as if it has meaning, but seems a little squishy to me.

I'll admit it's hard for me to see these things as "tropes", possibly because it's hard to see how they "convey information" which is either the main requirement or just one possible requirement of what a trope is depending on which Administrivia/ page you read. They don't really "convey information" to the audience in a lot of cases, but they do impact how the story is presented...

I'd be okay with def-only, though, most because it seems like the examples would all be very same-y if we had them and it seems less like something that'd warrant an actual example and more like something you could reference to describe how the scene was shot.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I think UN would actually make a lot of sense here. Camera work is important and affects how visual mediums are conveyed, but it's also (usually) not tropeable.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?

That's not how we define a trope. As stated on Main.Trope:

Camera tricks are by definition tropes. I'd prefer them to have examples, but I won't complain if it's decided they shouldn't. But they belong in Main/.

Ukrainian Red Cross

Like I said, it depends on what page you read. Compare that to what People Sit on Chairs has to say:

"Tropes are conventions used in storytelling to convey some sort of information to the audience. But when a character does something as trivial as sit on a chair, that's just something that happens normally or incidentally during the storytelling. Sitting in a chair isn't meant to convey meaning — it's not a storytelling convention. In short, it's Not a Trope."

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

We have several tropes that are only used to provide visual/audio effects, provide an aesthetic, or just set the mood, so not all tropes need narrative significance to be tropes. I don't have a strong opinion on the Camera Tricks tropes. I just wish they could have been further developed in the TLP.

Edited by MacronNotes on Jun 14th 2022 at 2:02:41 PM

Macron's notes

The various camera trick tropes are among the oldest on the side, from before YKTTW even existed as as a basic wiki page.

Camera tricks are not Chairs. The decision to use, say, a Tracking Shot, or a Rack Focus, is an intentional artistic choice to make the shot look a certain way or convey a particular mood.

Ukrainian Red Cross

Yeah to me these are the same as video game mechanics, which I often struggle with conceptualizing as tropes and not as "a basic thing a dev inserts to make the game work." This is not to say that I don't think they are tropes, I just can sometimes have a hard time wrapping my head around them.

Camera tricks are valid tropes, but if the bulk of the pages don't have many examples, we can make the page similar to Other Common Music Video Concepts, which is a collection of different tropes found in music videos. Each trope could theoretically be split if more examples were collected, but they currently are lumped together given how infrequently music videos are troped.

Edited by amathieu13 on Jun 15th 2022 at 8:22:12 AM

I think these are the only crowner options I've seen suggested, since it'll be possible to make one tomorrow:

• Make Trivia (not mutually exclusive with making definition-only)
• Make definition-only (not mutually exclusive with making Trivia)
• Merge into the main Camera Tricks page under a new folder (mutually exclusive with making definition-only and/or Trivia)

The Trivia option was influenced by what Tabs said about Wet-for-Dry. Either way, all three options would be available for each page in the opening post, which would mean 33 options total if I counted correctly. (Yeah, that's a large number for a crowner, but that's one of the downsides of batch threads.)

The lack of cut options was intentional; I'd rather leave that off the table.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jun 15th 2022 at 10:25:51 AM

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

Don't crowners cap at 25 options? Guess it's going to be a two-parter.

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup