Last week a few of my friends and I watched some films, one being House of Flying Daggers. I have watched this film before, but when I watched it this time I noticed how amazing the cinematography was. It is probably the most beautiful cinematography I’ve ever seen. What I was most impressed by was its great use of depth-of-field, which varied extensively through the film. I was also impressed by the amazing use of colour that was used to perfection throughout the film. Through this blog post I will analyse two of my favourite scenes that both exquisitely capture something so incredibly beautiful through amazing cinematography.
The first scene I will analyse is one of the opening sequences in which Xiao Mei plays the echo game by flicking beans to hit drums around the room. The scene contrasts between close-ups and wideshots from showing the close-up of the beans in a bowl that cuts to a wideshot that contextualises the whole scene with the circular drums surrounding the room. The focus and camera movement captures each bean as it flies through the air, while simultaneously moving back to capture Xiao Mei’s movement as she hits the drums with her sleeve. The seamless camera movement creates flow and aims at capturing every slight movement. The depth-of-field captures the intense emotions of her face blurring the background, yet still moving the camera around her in a circular motion, keeping her beautifully in focus. However, it is the next shot that is truly beautiful as the camera captures a bean flying seamlessly through the air as it bounces off two drums. It is truly amazing. What is so fantastic about this scene is the cameras ability to capture every moment in such fine detail through constant seamless camera movement and a really creative use of depth-of-field. Obviously, there is so much technical perfection and every shot would have been planned in great detail with an emphasis on creating beautiful imagery.
This emphasis on beauty is emphasised throughout the film through colour matching in the bamboo scenes where the costumes match the colours of bamboo hiding within the jungle, and the impressionist-like landscapes of trees and landscape in so many colours.
However, the scene that caught me the most is the closing scene where it snows contrasting the red of blood and the white of snow. The scene begins in true martial art fashion set on a field with the colourful tree jungle in the background. There are quick cuts to capture the speed of the fight. However, the true magic of this scene starts when it starts to snow, which is shown in the first picture in this blog. It is here where colour is used in complete contrast between the darkened sky and the colourful trees, where time-lapse photography is used to cover the scene in white showing a wide shot of the two men embedded within a world of snow. As they fight the camera captures in perfect focus blood flicking through the air and landing on the snow. Finally, there is another moment when Xiao stand up and throws her dagger through the air, where the camera follows it through the air cutting between shots of all the characters faces in a surreal-like fantasy. This surreal moment is created through the zooming/tracking camera movements and the strange out-of-this-world camera angles to emphasise the tragedy inherent in this moment.
What I learnt in terms of my own production is the extreme technical detail, where colour and depth-of-field create so much emotional weight to this film and carries so much meaning. Therefore I think in any production it is important to think about what colours you want to emphasise and how you are going to do this. In Doughnut we want to have a surreal-like moment in the second last scene when Bernard walks through the workplace after ‘killing’ Jonathan. We want to have flowing camera movement and in post-prod will speed up and slow down the movement. The emphasis will be on his red tie, and we will carry an emphasis on red throughout the film to carry the blood/jam theme throughout the script. I learnt that to really highlight red contrast it against white, therefore in costuming have Bernard wear a white shirt and because all the walls in the office are white it will be relatively easy to emphasise the red.
In our class yesterday as well as going through how a shoot should run we watched all our Lenny videos. It was impressive to see the difference between them all, and not in a bad way.
The first group’s Lenny was dramatic and went for an extremely emotional approach to the script. The cinematography was amazing with the still montage at the beginning highlighting the concrete harsh landscape. The cinematography was also very effective in terms of colour saturating the screen in dull shades of grey and diffused greens, browns, etc. The whole atmosphere was diffused. The drama was heightened by the building orchestral music and the cutting between Sharon and Lenny building up their confrontation and when they finally meet with the wideshot of Sharon running towards the collapsed Lenny to give the audience a full indication of this pivotal moment. The editing was effective and mostly used in terms of continuity editing, keeping the audience orientated and amongst the action. Overall for the first production I thought they effectively conveyed the script of Lenny keeping within the rules of production, such as obeying the 180 degree rule and knowing the camera very well in terms of exposure, focus and white balance. Out of all the films I thought this was the most technically professional.
The second Lenny used nearly the same location, but the feel was much different. It was highly saturated with a yellow glowing tinge, which Paul suggested was a white balance issue but anywho it was a very different feel. The shots were similar to the first with Lenny walking, Sharon’s shoes, the box, etc. However, it was slightly disorientating, which I didn’t notice till Paul told me explicitly so it wasn’t an extreme problem for me. The costuming was done well, with the high heels on Sharon as she struts in an amazing shot of her feet centered in the middle of the frame and the clicking of her high heels, which heightened the melodramatic style of the acting; Lenny in a suit and Sharon in a black dress. The dialogue sequence between Lenny and Sharon works really well with the cuts and doesn’t cross the line, using over-the-shoulder shots to create a sense of place and continuity that isn’t as present in the opening meeting sequences that were slightly disorientating.
Overall, both these films use similar things: music to heighten the emotional intensity, over-exaggerated acting and a large feeling of despair. However, they achieve these in different ways. The first one through the bleak, concrete setting emphasising the glowing red blood and the second one through the melodramatic heightened music and melodramatic acting.
In terms of our Lenny, i think it was highly different to the first two because it used rather extreme low and high angles, where at points we had the camera positioned on the ground. We also used a quite different setting. Even though ours wasn’t as polished as the others in terms of the audio I think we went a bit abstract. I wanted the main emphasis to be showing Lenny’s vulnerability, by 1. showing Sharon tower over him and 2. have really low angles of him, where the camera grounds itself within his subjectivity. Therefore I wanted to use extreme angles for this short exercise. Paul pointed out a few things that we could of improved on such as the exposure on Sharon’s face and having a reflection of Sharon in the mirror of the box, just to add something and make it better. Obviously, there are a few things we need to work at.
This week is all about sound, so this blog post is going to be all about sound. Hopefully, it will tie together what I have learnt in the readings with practice, which is in the form of Spongebob and Chopper. Therefore this post will be an analysis of sound in Spongebob and Chopper from the digital dossier, in relationship to the following readings:
Creating the sound design. In Alten, S. Audio in media, (p.266-286). Belmont: Wadsworth, 1994.
Sound recording. In Ayers, Rowan …et al. Guide to video production, (p. 85-91). 2nd ed. Sydney : Allen & Unwin, 1992.
This snippet of Spongebob is a perfect example of sound counterpointing picture. This is shown through the cardboard box, where the sound is rich with elaborate soundscapes, such as a pirate fight, rocket launching, traffic jam, etc. However, there is no visual indication of these happenings just an empty box (well apart from Spongebob and Patrick in a cardboard box, and it is this that drives Squidward insane. This sequence shows the power of sound and the expectations we hold when we hear certain sounds, which can directly match images, however there are none. What I mean by this is that this sequence presents a series of soundscapes, which are made up of the layering of sound effects, that when we hear them together they present a certain expectation of what we expect to see, however in this case we don’t. Therefore the sound is counterpointing the image to create a humourous joke that drives Squidward crazy. There is more to this sequence than the sound effects of the particular soundscapes, there is a sound that is associated with and we expect to hear whenever Spongebob says “Imagination.” Everytime this happens there is a short, upbeat, soft melodic song, which is used to stress the importance and also innocence of “Imagination.” It is important because this is the key to this scene it is Spongebob, Squidward and Patrick’s imagination, which are creating these elaborate visual soundscapes.
What is most significant about the Chooper sequence is the music when Chopper is walking down the street, which uses both high and low pitch at both extremes. There is a short low pitched drumming sound which rythmically combines with a sustained high pitched loud screechy sound. The combination of these sounds in the musical number, emphasises to me the mysterious nature of Chopper himself, where the drumming indicates something sinister, whereas the sustained screech alludes to something peaceful almost. The music works to define Chopper and combined with the image of Chopper walking down a street amongst undefinable crowds depicts Chopper as a menacing, stand out character, someone not be messed with. The next sound element which is significant is also about sound depicting and defining identity, however this time through the tonal qualities of dialogue, which seperate Chopper from his father. The raspy, coloquial, crude nature of Chopper’s father suggests someone who is unworldly and rough. In contrast Chopper’s voice has a softer quality, and is less coloquial, however is somewhat deep, which highlights a menacing quality.
In both these sequences sound is used in different ways. However, it is inevitable that it has a strong effect in conveying meaning. In Spongebob sound is used ironically to contradict image, whereas in Chopper the combination of dialogue and music works to define character.
