Visual Culture

Mise-en-scence

Mise-en-scence comes from French and means “put in place” or “place in the scene.” Started to be used in stage plays. The director can control and adjust the depth, distance, position and relative proportion of fifteen in the film through the control of the position of the camera, the camera lens, lighting and decor. Effectively regulate the relationship between emotions and elements in the story world.

Actors:The director uses the change of the actor’s movement direction and position, as well as the dynamic and static changes during the communication between the actor and the actor, etc., resulting in different shapes and scenes of the screen, revealing the relationship between the characters and their emotional changes .

LocationThe position of the scene can set the mood and support the action. For example, in a scene where a man proposes to his girlfriend, the family environment is set in a completely different tone from that in public.

Set design:Scene design is the objects and scenery in a scene. Scenes can not only be used to enhance the emotions of the characters or the tone of the film. You can also add more background information to the story.

Lighting:The intensity, direction and quality of the lighting have a profound effect on the image. Light can affect the color tone and depth, making us pay attention to a particular element in the composition.

Shot blocking and camera placement:Blockers collaborate with performers to determine their body position, gestures and movements on stage. In a movie theater, occlusion also involves calculating the position and movement of the camera, and may affect lighting, set design, etc. Lens blocking and camera placement are both effective tools to convey the status and relationship of the character to the audience.

Layout:The composition is carefully chosen to make up the lens frame and camera angle. Manipulating the composition can emphasize the emotional theme of the story and convey a meaning (or lack thereof) to the audience.

Space depth:空间深度是指人,道具和风景之间的距离,两者之间的距离与摄像机之间的距离有关。就像镜头阻挡一样,它可以告诉观众很多场景的色调和角色的状态。空间是浅还是深?这是否准确地体现了叙事的真相?

Movie film:Movie film refers to the appearance of the movie on the screen. Is it black and white or color? Is the film fine grain or grainy? How to choose depends on the film’s tone and story background.

costume:Costumes are the costumes worn by the actors and how to tailor them to suit them. In order for the costume to be effective, the costume designer must know which color is suitable for the character, and then coordinate it with the color suitable for the actor’s character and the color palette of the production design.

Hair and makeup:Hair and makeup are physical contacts that help actors transform into characters, such as artificial limbs, blood or aging techniques. Just like clothing, hair and makeup are the basic elements in the story.

For example

In “coco”, coco is MiG’s grandmother and Hector’s daughter. Coco is a bridge connecting MiG and Hector, which means that she is a bridge between the underworld and the world. At the end of the story, there is such a warm scene: MiG is kissing coco. Of course, creating a warm shot that can impress the audience is not just a close-up shot of the actors kissing and smiling. From the picture, we can clearly see that the color tone of the picture is red, which represents warmth. This is due to a soft red light on the left side of the screen. In the shadow of the picture, we can find the faint blue light to balance the picture. For Decor, the simple decoration behind the character: a table, a vase of flowers, a cross, and a candle. It represents a simple family’s belief in life and love for family members. All Mise-en-scence together constitute a warm picture. Even if we look at him as a still frame, it still allows us to feel the love and warmth between our relatives.

Visual Metaphor

As a kind of visual metaphor art, film is not only a monotonous, one-dimensional linguistic symbol, but also a variety of multi-dimensional non-verbal symbols. In other words, film communication not only has language and text symbols, but also a large number of visual, intuitive, vivid, and easily interpretable symbols, such as postures, expressions, scenes and their changing lens forms. These non-verbal symbols The extremely rich meaning of metaphors in movies has caused ambiguity and uncertainty in the interpretation of the theme of the movie. The audience’s aesthetic experience of those elements with visual metaphorical functions is an important reason for their success, and it also inspired the film industry’s enlightenment on whether commercial films and art films can coexist.

Essentially, visual metaphors are concepts represented by visual images. It symbolizes something much larger than the image itself, an incredible way of “showing” instead of “telling.”

It can convey large, complex, and emotional concepts without dialogue. It takes only a few seconds to gain insight into relationships, context, and tone.

For example:The son of a zookeeper

The focus of the film “The son of a zookeeper” is not to narrate a “drifting on the sea” illusory story, but to use this “drifting on the sea” scene to tell when similar encounters occur in life, the soul-to-heart collisions between life individuals produce mutual cherish Love, and a touching story that survived hardships. The presentation of this story, in addition to using artistic and aesthetic means, is also mixed with various special effects, especially in the performance of the kind-hearted juvenile school, the strong Bengal tiger, the fantasy sea and the lifeboat.

The great success of the film is largely due to Ang Lee’s constructing and designing elements with visual metaphorical functions such as people, animals, sea water, and ships. These elements are acquired through the director’s aesthetic experience. In a sense, it reflects the director’s mastery of the artistic and commercial film operation mode, especially the visually impactful, static and dynamic picture selection, organization and Control, let the audience immerse in it, endless fun.    

The visual metaphor of the film is achieved by constructing and designing non-living elements such as water and boats, and living elements such as humans and animals, which provides inspiration for the coexistence of commercial films and art films.

Bronenosets Potemkin

In the famous classic work “Bronenosets Potemkin” in the history of film, Eisenstein, at the climax of the whole play, quickly combined the shots of three stone lions with different poses and powers to form the “Stone Lion Roar”. The image makes the emotional appeal of the film reach its climax. First is the lying stone lion, then the stone lion with its head up, and finally the stone lion with its front feet leaping and roaring. This metaphorical montage contains the full meaning of the people’s anger against the cruel and cruel tsarist system, which has reached the point of being intolerable . In addition, there are many metaphorical shots that have almost become formulas, such as the red flag symbolizing revolution, green pine symbolizing indomitability, ice thawing symbolizing spring or rebirth, flowers symbolizing happiness… and so on.

Mother

Through the analogy of the lens or the scene, it implicitly and vividly expresses a certain meaning of the creator. This technique often highlights some similar features between different things to arouse the audience’s associations, understand the director’s meaning and appreciate the emotional color of the event. For example, in “Mother”, Vsevolod Pudovkin combined the shots of the workers’ demonstration with the shots of the thawing of the spring glaciers, to illustrate the unstoppable revolutionary movement. Metaphoric montage combines great generality with extremely concise performance techniques, and it often has strong emotional appeal. However, this technique should be used with caution, metaphor and narrative should be combined organically to avoid being forced.

Film Asthetics

Film art has three characteristics: cultural characteristics, art special effects and technical characteristics. Cultural characteristics refer to social, contemporary, national and international; artistic characteristics refer to fidelity, graphics, time and space, acoustics and montage functions; technical characteristics refer to content, form, choreography, performance, shooting, etc. “

The specific content of film aesthetics includes: the aesthetic characteristics of the aesthetic essence of film art; the relationship between the creation of film art and real life and the process of image depiction; the development process of film art and the evolution of film art concepts, genres and styles; The creative law of film art and the aesthetic character it should have; the relationship between film art and other arts; the aesthetic value and social function of film art; the psychological mechanism, process, characteristics, meaning and methods of appreciating film art.

Film aesthetics is the abstraction and sublimation of film aesthetic consciousness. Its basic task is to study how to engage in the creation of film art according to the laws of beauty and the relationship and interaction between the subject, object, ontology, and receptor.

There are two major schools of film aesthetics: one is the montage (or technicalism) tradition; the other is the documentary (or realism) tradition

For example:

As one of the most famous contemporary directors, Stanley Kubrick broke the tradition of Hollywood movies. Because of his colorful narrative themes and unique narrative style, he is also known as the pioneer of “New Hollywood” movies. Kubrick’s films not only expanded the narrative themes of American Hollywood movies and broke the inherent genre framework of movies, but also had a great influence on the development of later generations of image creation, guiding image creators to explore in films of different themes unknown. Among his many works, the most famous is “2001 A Space Odyssey”. Kubrick’s movie “2001: a space odyssey” undoubtedly laid the foundation for the visual aesthetics of science fiction movies. The philosophical propositions and brilliant audio-visual construction in the movie are still full of charm.

From Yingshi’s works, we can find many symmetrical compositions and bold colors. With the aid of computer technology, the visual effect of the movie has been successfully promoted to the extreme, and it has also successfully embodied people’s infinite reveries about the future of science fiction.

Color Composition

This kind of color layout and color structure formed by a specific color tone of a film is also known as the film color score. The color composition of a film often includes the following factors: the color modeling of the characters and the environment, the color characteristics of each scene, the color conversion between scenes and scenes, shots and shots, the color relationship within a single shot, and colors with specific meanings. The depiction of details. Color composition includes the processing and techniques of film color, which constitutes an organic whole to reflect the idea of color score.

Personal summary: Usually, in a specific scene, there is an overall tone first. On the basis of the whole, we can add complementary colors and other colors to neutralize. In the process, it cannot affect the overall big color.

The central idea embodied in the film through the depiction of main colors. This is the process by which the author has made long-term observations and reflections on life, accumulated a wealth of material, and then used film thinking to select, tailor, choose, and refine the material, turning it into a theme. The theme color composition occupies a dominant position in the film. It will command the characters, plot, details, dialogue, performance, structure, and even various expression methods in the film, so that it can serve the embodiment of the theme color, and use the film The completeness, harmony and unity of color art are presented to the audience.

The color of the theme must be bright, but the way of expression must be subtle. Usually through contradictions and conflicts, character and destiny, through the development of the plot, and the depiction of details, it naturally reveals itself, and the theme is revealed step by step through the meticulous step-by-step bedding and color design.

For example:

In the film “Red”, we can see red as the main color, almost everywhere, it constitutes another role of the film participating in the narrative, becoming an indispensable language. The whole film is about love, but it seems that it has nothing to do with the red hot love. Through red, the film explores a kind of fraternity, a kind of love that is not limited to life and death between men and women. Red is used as a clue to “love” throughout the film. The red jacket symbolizes the faded love in memory.

Joker

The movie Joker expresses the contradictions and conflicts between classes. The color tone of the film uses the classic red and blue of the clown, while the orange and blue are complementary colors, which have a strong contrast and conform to the setting of this movie.

The Matrix

The Matrix is a good example of monotone film color matching. Almost every scene in the movie’s world has a green hue. Green permeates everything, creating an illusory, “hypnotic” effect (representing the “sleepers” in the Matrix).

It is not difficult for us to think that the green of computer chips, the green of programs… Green represents mystery and has sci-fi colors.

Rhythm

The rhythm of the film can be divided into internal rhythm and external rhythm in form. The internal rhythm is the internal rhythm of the lens, and the external rhythm is the rhythm of the lens combination, that is, the editing rhythm. Internal rhythm mainly refers to the speed and intensity of character movements based on plot development, the speed and direction of camera movement, the coordination of music, sound, color, light and shadow, etc. External rhythm mainly refers to the rhythm of the film caused by editing methods, including the perception of time, the rhythm of vision, the rhythm of hearing, the rhythm of movement, the rhythm of color, the rhythm of narration, etc.

Feeling of time

A person’s sense of time is affected by his specific mental state. For example, when we wait to take a bus, the time will be extra long, and there will be relatively little information in the movie at this time, which will make the audience feel a relatively slow pace. The opposite is faster.

Visual rhythm

The visual elements in the film: light, color, lines and contours are constantly changing. Rhythm is produced through the changes of various motion laws.

For example:Diarios de motocicleta

When the motorcycle travels from far to near on the curved road, the originally static horse route is joined by the camera, presenting a dynamic and constantly changing curve. At this time, the immobile road has a sense of rhythm.

Auditory rhythm

The sound in the movie is not only through drum beats, but also the change of melody to express the rhythm of the plot. It can also reflect that the orientation of the space does not change. This hope is a variable factor in the formation of rhythm

Movement rhythm

The rhythm of the movement, as the name suggests, is determined by the speed of the movement. Sometimes the movement of the camera can also produce rhythm. For example, when a thief steals something, he will first slowly approach the object step by step. The rhythm at this time is slow. When the thief is found running away, the rhythm will instantly increase.

Color rhythm

The contrast of color in a movie is very rich. With the change of the plot, the rhythm of the color will also drive the plot to a high or low point.

Narrative rhythm

The rhythm of time, plot, or character development in the film, which includes plot rhythm and emotional rhythm.

For example, in the fast-paced “Inception”, the first suspense occurred in about 8 minutes. The audience is always relatively nervous when receiving information.

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