See film and write an essay according to questions that my teacher gave

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Home>English homework help>See film and write an essay according to questions that my teacher gave

Composition

  • Composition is the arrangement of the visual space within the frame
  • Formal arrangement of visual space
  • Elements of Composition:
  • Height, Width (aspect ratio)
  • Depth of frame
  • Rule of thirds
  • Vanishing Point
  • Leading Lines (vertical, horizontal. diagonal lines)
  • Color
  • Light

Composition (cont)

  • Composition has a long, highly evolved history in the arts--painting, theater, sculpture, dance, music photography
  • There are two main considerations
  • Functional
  • Aesthetic

Functional Composition

  • Functional composition serves the story, performance or dramaturgy (narrative logic)
  • Objects or Characters are framed so that they can easily be observed, and quickly understood
  • Action is framed or followed to convey WHAT is happening
  • emphasis is on content.
  • Head room, eyeline, lead room, point of focus are terms used in functional composition

Aesthetic Composition

  • The primary purpose of an aesthetic composition is to please the eye
  • Certain formal arrangements we call beautiful, others, not so beautiful
  • In an aesthetically pleasing composition:
  • Objects are arranged to create visual balance,
  • uniformity, cohesiveness or harmony.

Balance

  • Shapes (including objects, color, and light) take up ‘space’ in the frame
  • referred to as ‘weight’ in the frame
  • Often the biggest, or brightest, or most saturated have the most ‘weight’
  • A frame has balance when its ‘visual weight’ creates a cohesive whole, harmony or other ‘pleasing’ result.
  • attraction
  • Often a predominant ‘weight’ is is offset by complementary one or some other use of space, such as negative space

Balance (cont)

  • Leading Lines, both horizontal and vertical, create ‘boundaries’, defining space, directing the eye
  • Leading Lines
  • Color, tonal variation and shades of light have similar properties, giving ‘weight’ to the frame
  • Imbalance, may also be an ‘aesthetic,’ intentionally designed to create ‘disequilibria’

Depth of the Frame

  • Depth of Field - Range of acceptable sharpness from its closest point to its farthest point. Depth of focus within the frame
  • Shallow focus- Limited range Blurs foreground or rearground, strongly emphasizes point of focus, often creates abstract composition
  • Deep space- Visual depth, but not all planes are equally in focus. Tends to isolate characters against the background.
  • Deep focus- All planes, equally in focus

Deep Focus

  • Extreme range of acceptable sharpness extending from the foreground to ‘infinity’
  • Equal sharpness from foreground to rearground
  • Made possible by technical advances in lens design, lighting and film sensitivity
  • Welles and Greg Tolland (DP) in Citizen Kane
  • Graphic relationship between objects in foreground and the objects in the rearground
  • Narrative meaning

View Kane

Rule of thirds

  • The rule of thirds breaks the frame into a grid, intersecting at thirds

Rule of thirds

Object arranged at the intersection of thirds, naturally attracts the eye and creates visual cohesiveness

Lighting

  • Lighting provides practical information such as time of day.
  • Functional
  • Setting
  • It can radically impact, mood, and emotional content of a scene.
  • Often used as a compositional element, directing attention, punctuating space, or as a purely aesthetic element.

Contrast Ratio

  • One of the ways Lighting establishes mood is through contrast
  • Contrast ratio refers to the differences between highlights and shadows
  • A high contrast ratio will have deep shadows and bright highlights with little tonal variation – Film Noir, horror, crime.
  • A lower contrast ratio will have more tonal range in the mid spectrum – Romantic Comedies, beauty lighting

  • Clips: Tess, Clockwork

Closed Framing-Open Framing

  • Closed Framings arrest the eye, our attention is drawn in. In Closed framings we study the composition Information is ‘contained’ within the frame, often by formal compositional elements. Close framings have a strong aesthetic appeal.
  • Open Framings require the succeeding frame to complete its ‘meaning’. It ‘asks’ for the next shot. Dialog scenes are often Open Framings

German Expressionism/Weimar Film

  • 1919-1930
  • Seminal Film Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919)
  • Style influenced by social, political and economic upheaval following WW1

Expressionism and Visual Style

  • Bold ‘expressionistic’ use of sets, lighting and camera style, (to depict a society in turmoil)
  • Camera, lighting and set design heavily contributed to the development of the cinema
  • Directors and Cameramen influenced many aspects of genre and the Hollywood style: Gangster, Film Noir, Horror

FW Murnau- Camera Unchained

  • Considered by many to be the greatest German director
  • One technique pioneered by Murnau called the ‘unchained camera’ revealed a freedom and fluidity, evolving the camera into a unique storytelling device that assumed a POV of its own
  • Following his two highly successful films Nosferatu and The Last Laugh, Murnau is offered a contract at Fox to produce Sunrise (1927)
  • Sunrise, released the year sound was invented, is one of the most arresting, visually stimulating films ever made.
  • He died in an automobile accident near Malibu, in his early thirties.

Clip: The Last Laugh