Occasionally, a scene will require that your main characters be placed further back on the screen, leaving space in the foreground. This can be a great opportunity to add interesting visual depth by adding characters into the foreground. But be careful about adding anything that will distract from the main action of the narrative!

To direct characters into the foreground, use the spot directing and z-order/layer techniques in Sections 2.1 and 2.2, respectively. Remember to place the characters low enough on the screen after sizing them up (i.e. if your character has been resized to around 1.6, they’ll likely need be spot directed to a Y axis of -350 or so).

Here are a few examples of ideal situations to place characters in the foreground...