(UNIVERSAL, 2009)
In Oliver Stone’s JFK ,
cinematographer Robert
Richardson’s lighting
created a glowing, halo
effect, a design that he
repeated in films for
other directors, such as
Quentin Tarantino, and
which other cinematog-
raphers have employed
in homage to Richardson.
Frame enlargements.
halo-style lighting that made the characters glow under hot lights. Richardson has used this lighting style on other productions, and it has come to be known as the Richardson style. Shooting Spike Lee’s Clockers , cinematographer Malik Sayeed emulated this look during a police interrogation scene. Using floor and ceiling lights and a reflective table surface, Sayeed replicated “the Richardson aura.”
Among their many visual innovations in Saving Private Ryan , Steven Spielberg and Janusz Kaminski used an oddly configured shutter inside the camera, which created a streaking effect on the image because shutter and film frame were out of synchronisation. In reviewing the footage shot by combat cameramen in World War II, they noticed these streaking effects (which occurred when the cameras lost their loops), and they wanted to reproduce that look.
It became one of the memorable visual effects in Saving Private Ryan , and it has impressed other filmmakers, who have incorporated it into their own work. Michael Bay used it in Pearl Harbor (2000) during the bombing attack. In The Limey (2000), Steven Soderbergh removed it from the combat context of these films and used it for a flashback scene in which a character accidentally kills his girlfriend. The streaking effect helps to stylize the flashback and to visually suggest the tension and stress of the moment.
In Vertigo (1958), Alfred Hitchcock and cinematographer Robert Burks created a highly influential shot—the combination zoom and track in opposite directions—used to simulate the main character’s fear of heights. In the years since, 91
Cinematography
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (PARAMOUNT/DREAMWORKS, 1998); THE BOURNE
ULTIMATUM (UNIVERSAL PICTURES, 2007)
Filming with the shutter inside the camera out of synch produces these streaks of light in the image. Steven Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski were emulating the look of World War II combat footage, which frequently had this flaw. The look they achieved was so striking that other filmmakers have incorporated it into their own work, often with greater exaggeration. It has evolved into a stylistic device for expressing emotional or physical distress, as in this scene from The Bourne Ultimatum where Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) learns the truth about his origins as a trained killer. Frame enlargements.
the combination zoom-track has been used by a great number of filmmakers to
express unease, disturbance, or anxiety. Steven Spielberg used it in Jaws (1975) to capture the fears of police chief Brody (Roy Scheider) as he nervously watches bathers frolicking offshore. Martin Scorsese used it in Goodfellas (1990) to capture the disorientation of a gangster who realizes a trusted friend might be planning his execution. Spike Lee employed it in Clockers to show a mother’s reaction to the 92
Cinematography
spectacle of her son’s being beaten by a policeman. In The Ghost and the Darkness (1996), the zoom-track visualizes the rush of fear in a hunter facing a killer lion when his gun misfires. Hitchcock and Burks did more than create an effective visual metaphor for their main character’s psychological affliction. They fashioned an enduring visual symbol for emotional disorientation, a template for other filmmakers interested in evoking this quality of mind, a convention that has passed into the general vocabulary of contemporary filmmaking.
The repetition of visual conventions establishes compelling artistic realities not only for audiences but also for the artists who make films and who borrow from and are influenced by the designs of their peers. Memorable cinematographic designs establish powerful artistic traditions and influences on the work of subsequent filmmakers.
SUMMARY
The cinematographer helps the director to achieve a desired visual design by using the camera to capture images that reflect the director’s visual goals for the film. To do this, the cinematographer chooses a film stock and aspect ratio, and controls and designs the use of light and color in film and the planning and placement of camera setups. Cinematographers employ realistic and pictorial lighting designs. In the first they simulate the effects of a real light source on screen, whereas in the second approach they aim for more purely pictorial effects.
Either approach to lighting design will employ varying proportions of hard
(high-contrast) and soft (low-contrast) light. Specific lighting setups tend to create a hard or soft look. Low-key lighting is hard. High-key lighting is often soft. Like image and sound editing, lighting designs follow continuity principles. Light levels and angles must match across shots and even within shots when the moving camera is employed.
With respect to color design, a cinematographer lights objects on the set or uses colored gels over white lights to manipulate color hue, saturation, and intensity.
Color can be used to separate and define objects in a composition, but when shooting black-and-white, a cinematographer has to use gray-scale values when organizing a composition. Color cinematography establishes symbolic meanings, narrative organization, and psychological moods and emotional tones. In each of these functions, color is integrated into the overall dramatic context and design concept of a scene or film.
The cinematographer’s tools are shared by digital effects artists, and the scope of cinematography, as traditionally defined, has expanded to include the collaboration necessary for creating convincing digital effects.
Light and color designs, once established, can become enduring features of style, repeated across many films. When this happens, those designs take on a high level of representational reality. Filmmakers are sensitive to this, and if they need to express a particular social milieu, such as urban crime, or a time period, such as the 1940s, they may deliberately imitate famous lighting designs from older movies picturing those settings or periods. Filmmakers also may replicate the striking visual designs of fel-low filmmakers, deliberately borrowing design elements in a way that “quotes” from other films.
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Cinematography
KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS
additive
film noir
pictorial lighting design
anamorphic
film stocks
practical (light)
aspect ratio
gray scale
pre-visualization
back light
hard light
production design
burnout
hard-matted
realistic lighting design
cinematography
high-definition video
rear projection
contrast
high-key lighting
saturation
convention
hue
soft-matted
digital grading
intensity
soft light
digital intermediate (DI)
key light
subsurface scattering
digital light designer
letterboxed
subtractive
digital video
low-key lighting
Super 35
fall-off
mise-en-scène
wavelengths
fill light
performance style
widescreen ratio
SUGGESTED READINGS
Dan Ablan, Digital Cinematography and Directing (Indianapolis, IN: New Riders, 2002).
John Alton, Painting with Light (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
American Cinematographer , monthly journal of film and electronic production techniques published by ASC Holding Corp., Hollywood, CA.
Kris Malkiewicz, Cinematography: A Guide for Film Makers and Film Teachers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).
Kris Malkiewicz, Film Lighting: Talks with Hollywood’s Cinematographers and Gaffers (New York: Simon and Schuster 1992).
Pauline B. Rogers, The Art of Visual Effects: Interviews on the Tools of the Trade (Boston: Focal Press, 1999).
Pauline B. Rogers, Contemporary Cinematographers on Their Art (Boston: Focal Press, 1998).
Dennis Schaeffer and Larry Salvato, Masters of Light: Conversations with Contemporary Cinematographers (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).
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Production Design
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
■ explain the work of production design
■ describe how a design concept organizes a
film’s production design
■ describe costumes, sets, mattes, and minia-
tures, the basic tools of production design
■ explain changing production designs in
contemporary science fiction films
■ explain how production creatively transforms
existing locations
■ describe how production design in
fantasy films utilizes realistic perceptual
■ explain how production design can fabricate
information
locales that are made to seem real
From Chapter 3 of Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film, Sixth Edition. Stephen Prince.
Copyright © 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Production Design
In addition to cinematography, filmmakers use sets, props, costumes, and actors to achieve a film’s total visual “look.” This chapter examines the contributions of production design .
WHAT THE PRODUCTION DESIGNER DOES
The production designer is the individual who supervises the design of a film’s visual environments. The production designer oversees the work of set decorators and designers, costume designers, and the prop crew. This array of artists and technicians creates costumes and sets using colors and concepts supplied by the production designer, who arrives at an overall visual organization through close consultation and collaboration with the director and cinematographer. As a result of these conferences, the production designer prepares a series of sketches that illustrate the basic design concept and organization of the film. Set and costume designers then work to produce settings and costumes that embody the concepts outlined in the production designer’s sketches. During preproduction, the sketches are turned into storyboards and into miniature models that are used to plan camera and lighting positions.
Stages of Work
The first step in the production designer’s work is reading the script and visualizing the look of the film that might be made from it. Production designer Wynn Thomas ( Do the Right Thing , 1989) explains this in terms of “How do you want the movie to feel?”
Films that have a powerful and enduring “feel”— The Wizard of Oz, Alien, The Lord of the Rings —establish this through their production design.
The production designer will next break the script down in terms of budgeting issues. What kind of sets will be needed? How much of the film should be shot in a studio, and how much on location? What will all this cost? One of the production designer’s most important jobs is to find ways to trim these costs. In other words, the production THE DUCHESS (PARAMOUNT VANTAGE, 2008)
Skillful production design vividly recreates historical eras, as in this film about Georgiana Cavendish (Keira Knightly), the 18 th -century Duchess of Devonshire.
Filming occurred at more than a dozen historic homes across England, such as Holkham Hall, an 18 th -century country house on the coast of Norfolk. As selected by production designer Michael Carlin, these locations enhanced the realism of the film’s settings and costumes. Frame enlargement.
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Production Design
designer will explain to the producer how the film can be made for its allotted budget. As Stuart Craig ( The English Patient , 1996) explains, “The designer addresses the script and the amount of money available and offers the producer a viable way of making the film.”
It’s often cheaper today to build sets or to film locations overseas. All the exteriors in The Last Samurai (2003) were shot in New Zealand, not Japan, where the story takes place. Cold Mountain (2004), about the Civil War, was shot in Europe.
As the production designer breaks down the script in terms of budget issues, he or she also breaks it down into visual concepts, which are expressed in sketches.
These sketches of proposed sets that the production designer prepares from the script provide a first indication of how the film will look and feel. Many designers prefer to do these in pencil first—because lines and shadows stand out with more clarity—and only then move on to colored drawings.
Production Design as Character and Story Design
Creating the sketches and then the sets requires the designer to think about very specific issues of character and story. To design a set is also to design the characters that will live in it. A set makes a statement about the characters, and, therefore, to visualize a set often means thinking about the personality and the life history of the characters who will use it. John Beard, whose work as a designer includes The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), points out that to do good work, “you should know what art a character would have on their walls, what books they would read, and even what music they would listen to.” Wynn Thomas, who has collaborated frequently with director Spike Lee, speaks of this process as “character design,” and he encourages the actors to come on set a few days before shooting to explore it and become familiar with it. “I encourage THE ROAD (DIMENSION FILMS, 2009)
Choosing locations is one of the chief responsibilities of a production designer. But the locations where a film is shot do not always correspond to the locations of the story, and real locations may be altered, enhanced or changed to serve story and drama. Based on a respected novel by Cormac McCarthy, The Road shows a post-apocalyptic landscape, an unspecified locale devastated by a mysterious, unnamed catastrophe. The film was shot in Pennsylvania and Louisiana.
The neighborhood pictured here was a row of houses abandoned in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. In the actual location, an open freeway occupied the left of the frame, and the row of houses that appears there now in the shot is a digital element added to the image.
The car in the foreground is a real prop, but the brooding sky is a digital matte painting standing in for the clear and more tranquil sky that existed on the day of filming. Frame enlargement.
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Production Design
them to explore the space, open the drawers and look inside; I always provide the sort of stuff their characters might have to be dealing with, paperwork in a desk, for example.”
While these items may have a subliminal presence for viewers, they provide motivation for drama, setting and character. In a good design, their presence helps actors to give better performances. The Hollywood star Burt Lancaster travelled to Italy to appear in The Leopard (1963), directed by the great Luchino Visconti. At Visconti’s insistence, production designer Mario Garbuglia’s recreation of the film’s 19 th -century aristocratic world was so detailed and lavish that Lancaster was stunned to open the drawers of a dresser and find them fully stocked with clothing. Hollywood’s norm was only to design and build what the camera will see. Visconti had gone far beyond this, and Lancaster felt humbled, and he resolved to work extra hard on his performance in order to be worthy of this kind of attention.
A good example of the way that production design can motivate the drama is
found in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing . One of the main sets is Sal’s Pizzeria, run by Sal (Danny Aiello), a white Italian, and his two sons, but located in a black neighborhood. While Sal is p
roud that he has served food to the neighborhood for years, tensions with some of the black patrons flare up periodically. Framed photos that Sal has hung on the walls of the pizzeria provide one source of conflict. These show prominent Italian-American entertainers, like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Frank Sinatra, but the portraits do not contain any famous African-Americans. Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito), who eats a lot of pizza there, gazes at the “Wall of Fame” and challenges Sal about the absence of prominent black celebrities. Sal tells him if he gets his own pizzeria, he can put up any pictures he wants, but here only Italian Americans go on the wall.
Sal’s remark provokes a confrontation with Buggin’ Out, and the conflict flows naturalistically from the setting and the performances. Thomas points out that the actors spent time on the set prior to filming so that it would seem as if the characters had worked there or eaten pizza there for years, and this illusion comes across vividly in the scene. “I think it’s important that there’s a point where a set ceases to be a world I have designed and begins to become the world the actors live in.”
The celebrities on Sal’s “Wall of Fame” were pre-selected by director Spike Lee and Thomas in order to motivate this action. In turn, the action enabled Lee to make a thematic point. He agreed with Sal’s view, that the owner of the business gets to say what goes. One of the film’s sub-themes is the need for black-owned businesses, that black entrepreneurs would provide a vital link between economic development in the city and an expanding social authority. The pictures on Sal’s wall help to make this larger theme concrete.
Where the production designer puts a window in a set or places interior lights will determine how the set is lit by the cinematographer, so the two must consult early on.
The production designer will show the cinematographer his or her sketches and models and get feedback about potential camera positions. These, in turn, will affect how a set is dressed with props. The film stock chosen by a cinematographer will affect how skin tones look, and this, in turn, will influence a production designer’s choice of colors on the set.
As in other areas of contemporary filmmaking, digital tools have become im-
Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition Page 17
