Intentional visual design when composing shots

[Jason Ward]

Hi Roger, recently I’ve been thinking a lot about what my film teachers call “visual design”, where movies use certain visual motifs throughout, some examples are using flat vs limited vs deep space to reflect what the characters are going through, putting powerful people or things in the “golden section” of the frame, the difference between moving towards the right vs the left, basically a subconscious (to the audience) way of visualizing whatever the character’s going through. I was wondering if you as the cinematographer are thinking about these things when planning and composing shots, or is that more often the director making those types of decisions, likely in pre-production?

 

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[Roger Deakins]

I was hoping someone else would attempt to comment on this post!

Yes, a director and cinematographer will usually discuss a general approach to the visualization of a film, and we often do storyboards to illustrate what we intend, but I don’t believe moment to moment decisions are made in such a calculated way. Images are about feelings, as experienced by a cinematographer when composing a shot and, hopefully, in the same way by the audience on viewing it.

[Stip]

I was hoping someone else would attempt to comment on this post!

I for one am pretty glad that you commented 🙂

[dmullenasc]

You might want to read Sidney Lumet’s book on directing; he’s the sort of director who designed a shooting plan with those sorts of structural ideas, such as in “The Hill” when the focal lengths get wider and the depth of field gets deeper as the story goes, or in “Murder on the Orient Express” where the flashbacks to the interviews with the suspects that Poirot then recalls in his summation speech were shot with wider-angle lenses in a more POV style than the original scenes were shot.

Storaro has talked about the camera style of “Agatha” where the movements and angles were more rigid and linear in the early scenes to suggest Agatha’s entrapment in her marriage, and looser and more fluid in later scenes.

[Jason Ward]

Thanks for the response Roger, putting the emotional reaction first makes sense and helped me out a lot. I really appreciate how much time you spend sharing what you know with this new generation of film students, there’s way too much gatekeeping in this business. Especially coming out to these schools, your lighting workshop at my school, DePaul, helped me out a lot as well!

[Jason Ward]

Thank you for those recommendations Mr. Mullen, I’ll definitely look into that book and I really appreciate the help as well! That’s exactly the type of thing I wanted to know more about

 

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