shooting your sims story like an a24 movie: Creating a Split Diopter Effect with GShade/ReShade and GIMP
YOU NEED: GShade or ReShade, a preset with a depth of focus shader, photo-editing software (I use GIMP, which is free and open source), familiarity with the rule of thirds.
YOU WILL BE ABLE TO: use layer masks to edit together two screenshots to create a split-diopter effect.
WHAT IS A SPLIT DIOPTER / DUAL-FOCUS?
A split diopter is a special kind of lens that can be used to produce a dual-focus effect. A dual-focus effect means a shot with multiple planes of focus.
Like this. Both characters are in focus, despite being on opposite ends of the frame. The empty space between them is out of focus.
The human eye can only focus on one thing at a time. To demonstrate this, hold your hand up in front of your face. Focus first on your hand, and then on the wall behind it. While you’re focusing on your hand, the wall behind it is blurred. When you’re focused on the wall, your hand becomes blurred. In this example, your hand and the wall represent two different planes of focus: the near plan (your hand) and the far plane (the wall).
Like your eyes, a camera lens can usually only focus on one thing at a time. A split diopter shot allows you to keep both the near and far planes in focus simultaneously, with an out-of-focus band in between.
WHY USE A SPLIT DIOPTER/DUAL-FOCUS EFFECT?
Because your puny human eyes can only maintain one plane of focus at a time, a frame with two planes of focus produces an unsettling effect akin to the uncanny valley. You can tell something is wrong even if you can’t put your finger on why. A split diopter shot messes with the viewers’ ability to parse what’s going on in frame or where things are in relation to one another. For this reason, these kinds of shots show up most often in thrillers and horror movies, where the disorienting effect contributes to the overall mood and tone.
Split diopter shots essentially combine the strengths of the close-up and the long shot. It lets us see the emotions on an actor’s face and the chaos going down behind them. In a horror movie, we can see the injured protagonist frantically tending their injuries while their boyfriend is mauled by a werewolf in the background.
One of the most famous split diopter shots of all time is in Jaws (1975) where a conversation between our protagonists is interrupted when the swimmer in the background is attacked by the eponymous man-eating shark.
Pics taken moments before disaster.
Use a split diopter effect to create tension and unease. They’re useful for fitting a lot of visual information into a single frame or compressing the space between two distant characters.
A split diopter will undermine the mood of a happy or straight-forwardly romantic scene, but it can add drama and tension to an argument or betrayal. If you want to subtly signal to your readers that someone is lying or something is not quite as it seems, you can use a split diopter to contribute to that feeling of unease.
HOW TO CREATE A SPLIT DIOPTER EFFECT
You can create a split diopter effect by layering two screenshots with different planes of focus.
Step 1: Set up your shot. Our split diopter effect depends on being able to take two pictures of the same scene with different focal distances. Arrange your sims and objects, one in the foreground and one in the background. In my experience your foreground and background objects need to be at least 2 - 2.5 tiles apart. The further apart your near and far subjects, the easier it’ll be to compose your shot and create the effect.
I’ve decided that my near subject will be the sim and the canvas, and the still life will be the far subject. The canvas and the still life are approximately 2 tiles apart diagonally.
Step 2: Position your camera in tab mode. Enter tab mode. Zoom the camera around with the WASD keys and move it up and down with the Q and E keys. You want to find an angle where your near and far subjects are both positioned comfortably in frame with no overlap. Use the rule of thirds to help compose your shots: your near and far subjects should be centered in the first and third vertical thirds with an empty middle third. If you’re having trouble composing your shot, try zooming in and out with the Z and X keys. Zooming out a few clicks creates a fish-eye effect that will exaggerate the distance between your subjects and make it easier to get the screenshots you’ll need.
Step 3: Choose your preset. Open your GShade/ReShade control panel and choose a preset with a depth of field (DOF) shader. Make sure the shader has options for mouse-driven autofocus.
Step 4: Take 2 screenshots with different planes of focus. Once you’re satisfied with the position of your camera, click once so you can move your cursor without moving the game’s camera. Hover over the near subject, allow your DOF shader to bring the near field into focus, and take a screenshot. Then, without moving the camera, move your mouse to the far subject, wait for your DOF shader to focus, and take a second screenshot with the far plane in focus. Your two shots should be identical, except for the plane of focus.
Screenshot 1. The near plane is in focus. We can clearly see the canvas and brush, but the bottle is blurred.
Screenshot 2. The far plane is in focus. We can clearly see the bottle, but the canvas and brush are blurred.
Step 5: Open your screenshots in GIMP. Open your first screenshot GIMP, and then click ‘Open as Layer…’ and open the second image as a layer in the same file. I like to have my near subject on the top layer, but it doesn’t change the process or the end result.
Step 6: Add a layer mask to your top layer. In GIMP, I do this by right-clicking the top layer and selecting ‘Add Layer Mask…’ You want to select the second option, “Black (full transparency. Layer Masks allow us to make parts of our canvas transparent, and we’re going to use this function to create our split diopter effect.
Step 7: Add a gradient to your top layer. Find your software’s gradient tool. (In GIMP, you can bring it up by hitting the G key.) Use the color picker to set your main color to solid black (#000000). Then, with the layer mask selected, draw a broad gradient all the way across your screen, from the near subject to the far subject (make sure your main color is solid black). This will turn the layer partially transparent, fading from solid to see-through.
Move the cross-hairs around to see if you can create the effect.
Here's the end product of a fade-to-transparency gradient produced with a layer mask. You could also do this to recreate the nuclear annihilation montage from T2.
The end product. Both the canvas and the bottle are in focus, but the entire middle plane is out of focus (look at the light stand and the carpet pattern in the middle of the frame). As a result, the image feels somehow like an optical illusion. Your eyes move back and forth between the near and far subjects; you're not sure where you're meant to look. The overall result is just a little spooky, a little unsettling. It looks like a still from a David Lynch film.