Spot placement allows the director to determine the exact position and size (scale) of a character on-screen. A helpful feature, aptly named the “Spot Helper,” lets us to drag a character to a spot, resize him accordingly and see the exact coordinates and scale to enter into Donacode.
Helpful note: a character’s “default scale” is 1.280%
Spot Placement Syntax:
@CHARACTER spot % X Y in zone #
Example:
@ANGIE spot .5 50 -250 in zone 3
SCALE: is a decimal number from 0 to 2 (e.g. 1.5 or 0.4) that determines how much larger or smaller your character should be. The default scale of our characters, when they are in basic screen positions, is 1.280.
X: is the number of pixels from the left that a character stands. As we learned in Section 1.5, backgrounds are broken down into zones. When spot directing, any number between 0 and 360 will place a character on screen, but any number is valid. For example, you could spot direct a character at an X value of 450 in zone 1, but that would just mean that the character is over in zone 2.
Y: is the number that indicates how high up on the screen a character will be placed. The default Y axis of our characters, when they are in basic screen positions, is 0. However, as you can place them as high up as you’d like. However, note that the Y and scale are linked, so that if you place a character higher up on screen (a higher Y value), you’ll like need to reduce your scale to a smaller value, to create appropriate depth and perspective. As you can see from the image in Section 1.5, a character can technically be placed at a Y value of between 0 and 568, but you’ll notice that as you move characters higher up on screen, they will start to get cut off, especially depending on their scale.
The Spot Helper:
The Spot Helper works just like the Zoom Helper to generate the X, Y and % values of your character position. The toggle button “Switch tool: Move/Scale” lets you adjust the X,Y coordinates and size (scale) of character, respectively.
In the example above, the spot direction syntax in Donacode would be this:
@JOHN spot 1.280 200 0 in zone 2