Film Making that Inspires

Developing a visual style and method of story telling is key. I have so little experience with film making but have quite a lot of experience with film watching. I listen religiously to the great podcast “filmspotting”. This podcast has been helpful to understand how to watch and critic films with more understanding. I want to start a discussion and list of films and filmmakers that I especially appreciate and would like to model our style after. Other films in this group are ones that we have watched for research.

    

Director: Werner Herzog – Grizzly Man, Rescue Dawn, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Encounters at the End of the World.

Director: Seth Gordon – King of Kong

Costume related Documentaries: Confessions of a Superhero; Darkon, Trekies

Director: Gus Van Sant – Elephant, Last Days, Paranoid Park, Gerry

TV Series: This American Life

Gus Van Sant’s Portraits

I have been continuing to consider beautiful portraits. I keep coming back to the idea of the portrait as key to our project. Shelby mentioned that we need to move farther from the event and more to the individual subjects, it would help us turn the costume into the centerpiece. This seemed so key to directing our vision. I wonder if it wouldn’t help us to practice setting up these portraits of ourselves or friends just randomly to learn how to develop this style. The transition to video portraits will pose some significant challenges for us as we develop our style and for the subject to develop confidence and comfortability. We will have to have examples to show and clear direction to achieve our vision.

I was struck by the way Gus Van Sant really slowed down several times during Paranoid Park to take portraits of his characters. He used his signature walking down the school hallway take several times.  This simplicity created a slowness that offered a space for reflection that can be challenging for video. I realized that this is one of his signatures that I love from several of his films. One of the strange effects I experienced was that when I was watching the film I found these sections sometimes so slow that I would initially get distracted and even bored. The fascinating thing is that these are the images that really stayed with me for days after the film. If you haven’t seen these films or at least these sections I would recommend seeing them. If you only have time for one I think PP does a great job. I included a portrait from Paranoid Park above and Elephant, Last Days and Gerry following for inspiration.

Finally, I couldn’t leave off the portraits we reference so often from Confessions of a Superhero.

Portraits

Reneke Dijkstra is a photographer who knocked me off my feet when I first saw her portraits. When we talked about the overall look of our photographic style that we wanted to develop for this project, this artist immediately came to mind. I think that the etherial background and lighting is significant, but also the nakedness that you feel from the portraits amazes me. Somehow she is able to set the people in front of you to be observed so completely. The subjects look right back at you with such confidence that it is disarming, yet you are able to keep looking at them. The full body take from head to foot also allows you enter as a total observer. Here is a closer look:

Documentary: Objectified

Working at Trek in the industrial design department has made me more aware than ever of the design that we are surrounded by. In school I ran across the material culture department and found it fascinating. They just research, analyze and generally study the material objects that we humans create all around us. The idea is that we can read all kinds of things about the culture that they come from. 

My boss, the head of the ID department sent out an email about this documentary and I think we will have a lot to learn from it.

Objectified will start showing in Spring 09. Check out their site: http://www.objectifiedfilm.com