genre:

1917 (2019) dir. Sam Mendes
Cinematography by Roger Deakins

joewright:

Academy Award Winners for Best Cinematography:
2020 — Roger Deakins, BSC, ASC
1917 (2019)
Directed by Sam Mendes
Aspect Ratio: 2.39 : 1

1917 is made with a series of long shots, the longest of which was about 8½ minutes, stitched together. Sam Mendes, who worked with Deakins on 2005’s Jarhead, 2008’s Revolutionary Road and 2012’s Skyfall, says that shots averaged 20 takes, with the most difficult needing as many as 50. The experience of working with such meticulous choreography was “exhilarating,” Deakins says. “Everyone’s high-fiving. All the grips I’ve known for, like, 30 years, saying, ‘Oh, my word, that was something. I’ve never done that before.’ It was really great.”

One tricky sequence featured the pair crossing No Man’s Land, which Mendes says involved “constantly changing the actors’ relationship to the camera so you weren’t simply following them from behind.“ 

Explains Deakins: “When we got on No Man’s Land, it was like, ‘OK, well, how do we work with the actors and choreograph the camera movement with the actors so you see details, and then you go from one character’s close-up to another character?’ And then you see them wide, and then you see what they’re looking at. That was really interesting. That informed a lot about what we were going to do with the rest of the film — how we could free the camera at moments where we needed to.”

“We spoke early on about not wanting an audience to think about, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, look where they put the camera.’ So the camera doesn’t do anything showy. The goal was to make sure that the camera followed the action but didn’t draw attention to itself. You just wanted it to disappear in the image, and for the most part, I think that’s quite successful,” Deakins says. — [x]

norasephron:

Dancing in Film: The kaleidoscopic top shot (made popular by Busby Berkeley)

42nd Street (1933) dir. Lloyd Bacon
Singin’ in the Rain (1952) dir. Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen
Beauty and the Beast (1991) dir. Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise
The Lion King (1994) dir. Rob Minkoff, Roger Allers
The Big Lebowski (1998) dir. Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Reefer Madness (2005) dir. Andy Flickman
Mamma Mia! (2008) dir. Phyllida Lloyd
Hail, Caesar! (2015) dir. Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Paddington 2 (2017) dir. Paul King
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018) dir. Ol Parker

amatesura:

light and dark

joewright:

Female cinematographers: Rachel Morrison
Black Panther (2018)
Directed by Ryan Coogler
Aspect Ratio: 2.39 : 1

“If there’s anything consistent about my work it’s not flat. The criticism of Marvel movies whether it’s in the cinematography or in the Digital Intermediate is that sometimes sort of lack contrast and saturation. That certainly isn’t true of my work from the outset, so hopefully the look we’re presenting will hold through to the end. But I think in making something so big, if you take for example an exterior day scene that’s shot over 15, 20 days you’re not gonna have all sunny days so what happens at the end of shooting when it’s half sun and half cloud. The natural tendency is to lean into something in the middle, to kind of flatten out the contrast on the sunny day and maybe try to bump up the contrast on the cloudy day and find somewhere to meet in the middle. That was my biggest concern going in was that we don’t allow that to happen, so we would throw hard light at people on cloudy days just to kind of increase the contrast.” — Rachel Morrison

thesilenceofthefannibals:

Hannibal + Scenery

princesschiyoh:

Hannibal + Florence

amatesura:

All I see is dark swarming behind my eyelids. I dream darkness comes into me. It comes and it’s insidious.

mirayuuki:

The Bryan Fuller effect.  (Hannibal ― American Gods)