Cinematography: The Look of Our Film

In a previous post, I alluded to cinematography whilst talking about the films of David Fincher. I talked about his film having a 'distinctive visual style'. This style is created by the use of specific camera shots and lighting, and these processes are collectively known as cinematography.

Tom and I see our short film as having a minimalist feel. This is not to say that we will only put minimum effort into cinematography, or that we will only take minimal control of the images we capture. On the contrary, it means that we will ensure that our film doesn't have an elaborate look; it is supposed to be a personal story with a cerebral feel, and we want to focus the audience's attention in this direction, not to have them distracted by a great amount of unnecessary detail.

Good examples of this style in use are Dennis Gansel's German film Die Welle (The Wave - 2008), and the aforementioned Dead Man's Shoes (2004) from British director Shane Meadows. What both have in common with our film is that they are thoughtful and psychological thrillers. The shots are clean and simple, with an unobtrusive mise-en-scene and, for the most part, natural lighting, as illustrated in the screen-captures below. This is the kind of style we aim to recreate.

Die Welle



Dead Man's Shoes

As you can see, the focus in the shots above is clearly on the characters; the people around which the narrative revolves. One of the central aspects of our film is going to be the protagonist's ambiguous internal monologue, and a clear cinematographic focus on the protagonist will complement the monologue and add to our creative exploration of the character. To maintain such an intimate visual focus, we will mainly use mid-shots and close-ups which reveal the body-language and facial expressions of our actors, with the occasional long-shots to establish and close scenes.

We do intend to make use of effects in post-production, but again, we want to keep these simple, so that they serve their purpose of communicating the narrative, as opposed to making the film look cinematically elaborate. Some examples of effects are a monochrome colouring to show events of the past, and a translucent overlay of two different videos to show a character's thoughts. Tom is going to work out how we can create these effects, and I will post I link to this below when it is ready.

Update 2/12/10 - Tom and I have arranged to work through the methods for creating these effects with the school Media Technician, so that we will both have the knowledge and experience when it comes to the editing of our actual piece. Tom will still be responsible for posting this information, and I will provide the link to that post below.

-We actually decided to show what we have learned in a video in this post: http://blainekenneallya2media.blogspot.com/2010/12/production-log-3-experience-in-editing.html

Sources of Inspiration

Since reading Tom's posts on Inspiration for Our Short Film and True Leaders of Film, I have been thinking about how films inspire us in different ways. As Tom shows in the former post, some inspiration is direct; we see a shot or technique used, we see the value and effect of it, and we subsequently try to recreate something similar in our own work. After reading the latter post though, I realised that, in role models: the people we admire and aspire to be like, we find a different kind of inspiration. The indirect inspiration that we gain from role models doesn't push us into recreating the work of a particular person, but it does encourage us to acheive similar things; to produce works that in some way match up to those of the role model, whether it be in content of the piece, its effect on an audience, or in the amount of success it has enjoyed. Whilst these two types of inspiration are equally valid, I believe that they are most powerful when combined.

In a previous post, I stated that, 'currently, we are aiming to produce a cerebral drama with a tint of mystery and noir.' Below, I have compiled a list of films that can be said to combine these elements of genre, where I find direct inspiration in the type of narratives and visual styles they contain, and indirect inspiration in the effect they have on an audience. 

Donnie Darko
Described as a 'beautifully twisted masterpeice' by Empire, Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko is a film that suspended me in wonder from start to finish, and has maintained its position as my favourite film since first viewing. I personally revere the film because of its synthesis of creativity and complex thought, so that the audience are drawn in both by the appealingly dark aesthetic, and by their intrigue for the mysteries presented by the film.

The film seems even more astounding when we consider that it was Richard Kelly's directorial debut with a feature film, that it had a relatively small budget of $4.5 million, and that it was shot over a period of only 28 days! Kelly's masterpeice inspires me because it takes viewers on a thrilling and thought-provoking journey, with an unconventional narrative that people will puzzle over again and again. If Tom and I can develop a narrative that provokes thought in this way, then we will be very much satisfied that our project has been worthwhile.


The Films of Christopher Nolan

Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight were all directed by Christopher Nolan, and can all be said to combine the style of film noir with the genres of mystery and psychologcial thriller. Similarly to Richard Kelly in Donnie Darko, Nolan weaves complex thought and creativity together to present an audience with something that is both aesthetically and intellectually pleasing. However, I feel his genius surpasses that of Kelly, because whilst Kelly's post-Darko work has become increasingly reliant on far fetched sceince-fiction tropes, Nolan maintains an air of sublime mystery, darkness and suspense in every film he works on. Morevoer, he prevents audiences from becoming tired and acclimatised by giving each film its own distinct twist: 

• Memento could easily resemble any other contemporary thriller, were it not for the unconventional spin Nolan puts on the genre, revealing the narrative backwards in segments through the eyes of a character with an unusual form of memory loss.
• The Batman films provoke thought about society using the dystopia of Gotham City, but pays homage to the roots of the franchise with comic-book action.
• The Prestige is a film about illusion containing a plot that is an illusion in itself, but all of this is presented in the style of a period drama with a visceral Victorian London setting.
• Inception explores the intracacies of the human mind, the pervasive nature of love, and the existential crises we face, all within a conventional heist-movie narrative with a deeply emotional dramatic edge.

The intellectually challenging nature of Nolan's films has directly inspired me to work with Tom in weaving a narrative that will encourage people to think both openly and introspectively. His recurring method of giving each film a distinct twist has inspired me to try and do similar; to produce an intellectually thrilling short film containing enough drama to pack an emotional punch.

The Films of David Fincher
Although I have only watched two of Fincher's films: Fight Club and Se7en, it is clear that he chooses a distinct visual style for each of his films. In Se7en, it is the dank, dark brown, rainy mise-en-scene that provides the character for the film, and in Fight Club, it is a similar dark, dingy mise-en-scene, juxtaposed with visceral action and saturated lighting that makes it recognisable.

Recognisable is the key term here, and the reason Fincher's styles inspire me, because a distinct visual style gives a film easily recognisable properties that can be transferred to trailers, posters, reviews or any kind of advertisement material. Such a distinct visual style for our own film would obviously be desirable, as it would give our film the recognisable properties that we can use in our ancillary products of a poster and a film review.

Fortunately, Tom and I take much of our inspiration from similar sources, and since beginning the course, we have been discussing and sharing our favourite films to ensure that our respective visions for our own film and the ancillary products are as similar as they possibly can be. I am confident that we can use our overlapping sources of inspiration, along with our individual ideas, to create a short film that is both original and professional.

Directorial Techniques to Consider

Now that we have our initial ideas pinned down, it is important to begin considering the practical techniques we can actually use to convey those ideas. After listening to our pitch, our teacher provided us with some films that may be of interest to us. Among these were the films Apocalypto, for its ability to tell a story in a foreign language, even if watched without subtitles, and Dead Man's Shoes, for its distinctly British style in both a visual and narrative sense. 

Apocalypto
Apocalypto is an action epic made by Mel Gibson in 2006, which focuses on the story of one Mayan villager during the civilisation's demise. Although our aims in making a short film are pretty much polar-opposite to those of Gibson in his high-budget feature, Gibson does utilise techniques that we could also find useful. In our pitch, I explained that an important feature of our film would be an internal monologue of the protagonist. Because this monologue will dominate the film, we won't be including a great amount of diegetic dialogue. However, one of the main messages we want our film to carry is that 'selflessness often goes unrecognised,' and the lucidity of this message obviously depends upon the minor characters' reactions to the protagonist. If we are to keep the amount of dialogue to a minimum, and also illustrate the minor characters' ignorance of the protagonist's actions, then we must be efficient in visual storytelling.

This is where Apocalypto is relevant. All of the speech is in the Yucatec Maya language, and without subtitles, viewers such as Tom and I, who are far from fluent in the language, have to watch the film more closely to understand it. Viewing a film in this way makes the role of visuals in the storytelling much more apparent.

The excerpt below illustrates this well; even if it is muted, and the subtitles are ignored, the scene still makes sense. A story is told through the physical actions of the actors, the type of shot that captures them, and the way these shots are edited together. 



After watching the film with visual storytelling in mind, one thing that stood out to me was the abundance of eyeline matches. These are a staple in visual storytelling, because they exhibit the world of the film from a character's perspective, and provide justification for the way that character may act. Even if they are very short and subtle, they can convey important pieces of information. One example of a very subtle but important eyeline match can be seen at 2:54 in the video above; if it were not shown that the offering had been presented, then a factor of the negotiation between the two tribes would be lost, and the tribe of Jaguar Paw would seem much more easily persuaded. The fact that so much of the meaning of the scene would be changed by the omission of one shot illustrates the potency and importance of visual storytelling, and shows why it will be an important factor for Tom and I to consider during the production of our film.

Dead Man's Shoes
Dead Man's Shoes is a gritty independent thriller about a disaffected soldier who returns to his home town in the British midlands to take revenge on those who caused the death of his brother. As a film directed by Shane Meadows working with Warp Films, it works to most of the conventions of the vigilante/revenge thriller genre, but is set in a small town in the British midlands. Whilst the location initially seems incongruous, the beauty of Meadows' directing is in the way he can ground even the weirdest and wildest of events in reality through his use of characterisation and dialogue, so that they don't seem incongruous at all.

This aspect of Meadow's films can be seen in the below excerpt of Dead Man's Shoes. From 0:50 onwards, we see Meadows' interpretation of a conventional 'character stand-off'. Although we have many of the conventions of such a scene from a an old Western movie; namely two enemies sizing one-another up in quite a lengthy sequence to create a great amount of tension, Meadows manages to depict something that is quintessentially British. The characters are made to fit into both their location and the situation at hand; they look moderately intimidating as a gang, appear realistically unprosperous in the car they use and the way they dress, and seem quite uneducated in the way they ineloquently converse. At the same time, the protagonist, with whom the leader of the gang talks, is very unnerving in his arrogance, but without breaking the bounds of what is credible for such a person in his position. (This is all very much related to the concept of semiotics, which I introduced here on my AS blog)



Essentially, Meadows keeps his films sharp and interesting by providing the audience with a certain amount of social realism. Realism helps to captivate people, because they feel more willing to empathise and associate themselves with characters who could believably exist in this world. Realism will be a very important aspect of our short film, because whilst we are including surreal and ambiguous elements, we want the film to comment on the real world, and how real people interact. We will not be able to convey such a message unless the audience can conceivably relate the film to their own lives.

Another aspect that stood out to me on first viewing was that of the humour in the film. Despite its overly dark tone and tense atmosphere, Dead Man's Shoes contains some very funny moments, which help to break up the intensity of the plot in order to keep the audience just comfortable enough to continue watching. Many such moments contribute to the social realism of the piece, as real life is very rarely serious for extended periods of time. I feel that this kind of humour has almost become a trademark of British cinema, and a good example of it can be seen at 2:10 in the above clip, where we cut to a shot of the gang, squashed into the back of the car, debating what their leader is and should be doing.

Another illustration of this kind of humour can be found in the following clip from Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smocking Barrels from 1:00 onwards, where Vinnie Jones' character tells his son off for swearing, despite bringing him along in his day-to-day work as a loan shark. In this context, comedy is created because, whilst the sentiment of the father in not wanting his son to swear is realistic, the situation they are in at the time is not. 



Whilst I personally like this kind of 'socially realistic' humour very much, I do not think it would work particularly well in our short film. The humour works well in Dead Man's Shoes because, as I mentioned earlier, it eases the intensity of the plot and balances with the dark tone. Our film, however, must be short. Therefore, if we were to include a similar comedy moment, it would form a much bigger portion of the overall piece, and would definitely interfere with our surreal, cerebral tone. If we are to include any such humour, it won't be anything significant enough to be described as a 'moment' as such, and could be something as simple as one character insulting another.  

In summary, the directorial techniques which we will now consider are:

• Visual storytelling - use of eyeline matches and other such shots to convey information with minimum dialogue.
• Social realism - use of mise-en-scene, costume, location and characterisation to add a sense of realism and captivate the audience.

Pitch: Ideas and Inspiration for a Short Film

Since my last post, where I explained my decision to make a short film for my A2 Media practical unit, I have also decided to work on the film with Tom Palmer, and together we have combined ideas and shared our inspiration to develop a succinct plan for our film and its subsidiary projects. Below is a video of Tom and I pitching our initial ideas to the class, and also sharing some useful information we have found about the creation, distribution and exhibition of short films.


Project Pitch from Blaine Kenneally on Vimeo.

For further information on the visual inspiration for our short film, please follow this link to Tom's blog.