3 Brilliant Moments in the Visuals of Emotion

last time we told you what our favorite emotional moments were in Y but now we want to focus on the how how some of the best filmmakers out there have created images just dripping with feeling it's in the acting the writing the music and the sound but today we want to focus on the imagery these are three brilliant moments in the visuals of emotion [Music] there's a familiar piece of advice in screenwriting to avoid writing unfilmable z' it's one of the oft written unwritten rules of the trade and what every saved the cat robert mckee self-help screenwriting guru means is that we must all remember that filmmaking isn't a medium that lives on the page is simply born their films live on the screen in image and movement and color and form and sound and music and spoken word and some words just don't have a corresponding visual which can be a big problem in screenwriting and pictionary and why don't personally agree that screenwriters should always avoid writing unfilmable z' they're often handy short hands that give tonal clues to the filmmakers the point still stands cinema is the land of show don't tell eventually someone has to render abstract concepts on the screen without the benefit of explanatory words and if you watched our top ten list in two weeks ago you know that one of the most important abstract concepts filmmakers will ever have to commit to celluloid is that of emotion and whether it's the screenwriters job or the directors you can't just film sadness as if it's a thing you can point your camera at and press record there's an interpretive step in the whole process that involves decoding what sadness actually looks like a lot of times sadness just looks like this now this might seem like a tautology duh that's sadness but it's not quite it's a person experiencing sadness but we cut out the middleman in this case Haley Joel Osment and his Trueba Klee emotive face and just see what he's feeling but communicating an idea of emotion isn't enough for film most of the time we want to feel it to get that full immersive experience and we talked about this a lot last time but just showing a person feeling an emotion can do this most of the time doubly so if we're invested and identified with their character mirror neurons cause us to partly experience the emotions we see others experience rendering the vicarious a little less vie and a little more curious or whatever and we've just shown you like eighty five bajillion shots of sad people and it's probably a fair bet even with absolutely no context you're starting to feel at least a little something but this is easy mode it's a blunt instrument if all filmmakers did with shoot characters feeling a certain way you can bet we get bored of it rather quickly and we also know that just shooting an emotion can be rather subjective and context-dependent the famous and off referenced coolish test tells us we actually project our emotions onto characters just about as often as it goes the other way around show a character with a neutral expression in a bowl of soup and he's hungry same characters same neutral expression this time with the casket and he's in mourning back in the realm of the screenwriter narrative shape has the enormous capability to affect our emotions by playing with either the fulfilment or withholding of hope and expectations setting up narrative goals or desires that we're rooting for and either giving them to us or frustrating our wishes for them and then there's the score and this is a cheat code if there ever was one because for some reason music is a backdoor into our emotions there are some magical combinations of sound and rhythm and melody that just make us automatically feel of course it's not like filmmakers are using these techniques in a vacuum the most effective emotional moments are a perfect storm of believable and emotive actors clever juxtapositions sympathetic story occurrences and a particularly moving score but we want to focus on our original question that of making emotions visual sort of the holy grail of cinema is putting this emotions on screen in such a way that with no context no sound no cuts no faces your eyes lead you directly to the feeling so I'm going through some of our mentions from our last top ten one that immediately came to mind was Brooks his release from Shawshank Redemption in this scene Brooks one of the oldest inmates at Shawshank is led out on parole after 50 years terrified at the prospect of freedom as it heads up we are going to spoil the [ __ ] out of this scene it won't ruin the movie but it will spoil the moment but if you're ready pay attention to how the filmmakers visually communicate isolation [Music] you [Music] [Music] dear fellows I can't believe how fast things move on the outside I saw an automobile once when I was a kid but now they're everywhere the world went and got itself in a Big Damn hurry [Music] the parole board got me into this halfway house called the brewer and a job bagging groceries at the food way it's hard work I try to keep up but my hands hurt most of the time in a sequence that ends with the words Brooks was here permanently etched into the very rafters from which he hangs doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that this is a sequence about recognition of one's existence in an uncaring world or rather the lack thereof now we've got the music we've got the heart-wrenching voice-over narration we've got James Whitmore's expressive face but even if you take that all away Darabont and Roger Deakins are still saying something on the screen and while we love this shot of an absurdly big halfway house room swallowing Brooks up in the loneliness of too much space and this shot of him hanging from a symbol so immediately obvious we're willing to break our rule of not dissecting symbols because films aren't DaVinci codes ciphers they're emotional experiences we're looking at you room 237 which strikes his most clever is how Darabont and deacons managed to make Brooks and us as his audience feel alone in a crowded space in a shot where he's absolutely boxed in by background actors every single one of them is pointed away from him with her eye lines pointing outwards such that he is compositionally surrounded by their backs take a look at some group shots from other films and even this shot of the boys back in Shawshank from moments prior and then compare them to this in fact this visual trope holds true for almost the entire sequence you can see it here and here and here and established in the quite literal turning point here the man yelling at him in a car is kept off-screen the manager only turns his body towards him to scold otherwise it's all Beck's and we feel this compare how this frame feels to an alternative like this I mean it's not exactly a pleasant emotion the actors all have relatively negative expressions but it's certainly not isolating or lonely anymore we'd go with persecuting and accusatory and with a pretty bad Photoshop job we've changed this entire feeling of the scene in a single frame which says a whole hell of a lot about how much these little details can matter we're not even focused on these other actors you have to point us to an emotion in an instant which isn't always easy to do in precisely staged images can be evocative of mostly nothing but carefully planned imagery can save volumes simply by something as simple as the way a person is pointed in the background which is exactly why we think Shawshank gets this moment exactly right let's take a look at 12 years of slave to see how composition can affect emotion we're not even going to bother with context for the scene the visuals are strong enough that we don't think you need just dive right in and feel away then let's figure out why [Music] bet you get master bored bonus brilliant moment to the juxtaposition of these two shots that so economically explained to us the exact mechanics of this disgustingly inhumane torture without a single word so for the rest of the scene we can identify this sound and this sound with a half choked mortal struggle with oxygen that wasn't even that fun when Deadpool did it and they took like lines upon lines of dialogue to explain that but it gets even more effective when we get to here and on its own this shot and it's merciless refusal to cut away is discomforting enough if you put a good man being tortured on screen you can bet your audience is going to feel something but it's important to pay attention to the conflict that enters into the image we don't mean narrative conflict in the sense that these two people want competing things but visual conflict where the image itself pulls you into two competing directions such that their contrast gives deeper meaning and emotion so after a moment where solomon hangs alone and in a brief moment of expectation and subversion where we're hoping the figures creeping into the image will help him we settle into the uneasy tension between suffering and apathy and just as it deftly as McQueen arranges the portions of this shot in time he also arranges them in space because while there are many people in the frame we would argue that there are only two subjects Solomon and a normal day in the fields behind him as humans were actually pretty bad at processing detail scenes as complex as a Where's Waldo illustration just look like incomprehensible chaos unless we really sit there and study them and even then we're only taking in their narrative one tiny red and white striped detail at a time in order for us to understand ideas especially complicated abstract and especially emotional ones we need to have them properly chewed up digested and then regurgitate it into our brain mouths like greedy little baby birds a good composition isn't then made up of lots of random specifics but an immediately understandable arrangement of a few various figures in their associated meaning into a larger whole for narrative effect this is Gestalt the arrangement of component pieces into a hybrid object kind of like a Power Rangers Megazord where the parts fall out of the focus of our attention in favor of their sum and McQueen does this by taking this hanging scene and throwing it on top of a well staged background that evokes in everyday cotton field pastoral in this way he's not photographing four to five different people just one and an idea Solomon and everyday life McQueen who trained as a painter before turning to filmmaking does this by dividing and supporting contrast down compositional lines in this case along different planes even when one of the slaves comes to help him it doesn't fracture the layered contrast she walks in from the side instead of up from the distance consider this against other frames that use contrast for emotional effect those that support their contrasts compositionally and those that do not the composition guides our reading of the contrasts if two different emotions are just slopped on screen with all the conscientiousness of an elephant emulating Jackson Pollock it doesn't much evoke anything we have to seek it out and it just reads as noise until we're told where to look it's like trying to understand this sentence read all at once solids leaves carrion you can't do it we can only understand one thing at a time it's why we personally abour split screen sequences and think they're both lazy and pointless filmic but carefully compose something that separates out the important visual concepts for our human speed digestion and Solomon hangs by his neck as his fellow slaves carry on calmly in the background and it is brilliant so for our last moment we're looking back at our list from our last episode right at number one at children of men's ceasefire because we think the cuarón is doing something compositionally brilliant by blocking actors and the camera both in such a way that it's not just their position that communicates an emotion but their motion humanity is at its end a blight has rendered everyone infertile man and woman kind have failed to produce a single child in two decades when in a singular moment of hope a baby is born amidst the desolation you [Music] [Music] [Music] in this scene children of men presents us with the incredibly touching concept of a newborn babe legitimately bringing peace to warring men in a moment of euphoric optimism amidst the bleak and the even bleaker but it also puts that emotion on screen at scale and that's not actually an easy thing to do especially visually but cuarón basically takes the blocking principles of Shawshank to create an emotionally evocative tableau the compositional principles of 12 years a slave to make it immediately readable and digestible then puts it on wheels and rolls it through the building with the camera so that we can actually see the emotion move through a space that's right we think the genius here is that what cuarón is actually pointing his camera at isn't just an army and a baby it's the concept of hope itself and not just static hope hope in motion cuarón rightly identifies the image of a soldier moved by a baby as the most effective visual conceit of his entire film and realizes that it's not just in the adoration but in the shift from hardness to softness from violence to peace that makes for the best most moving most comprehensive impact and this works because it shows us two states the before and the after and then contrasts them in time and we get to look at it and play what's the difference and the answer is hope maybe we wouldn't so easily grasp an image of hope in the vacuum but when contrasted against its absence it emerges from the juxtaposition first he premieres it here as the rebel lowers his weapon then he establishes a pattern as the British soldier does the same and then in the emotional climax of the scene they step outside and the soldiers stand practically one by one at just about the moment they hit Center frame and here cuarón isn't just contrasting it in time he contrasted in space too by letting this change take place not all at once but moving across the set in the screen spreading through a crowd like a slow wave until it has enveloped this sad grey world for a brief beautiful moment of brilliance they don't all react at once they wait for their moment in the spotlight as the camera passes by soldiers aren't the subject of the shot their progressive reaction and as we know the reaction is the visual representation of hope Karan has managed to film rolling hope compare these with earlier moments that present the reactions more statically more simultaneously they work sure but not quite with the same magic and while this may or may not be how a crowd would organically behave it makes for an excellently digestible and readable moment on screen its performance working with blocking working with camera movement for an incredible forty seconds of gradual mounting impact which makes it an absolutely brilliant example of how to use composition to make us feel so what do you think what's your take on these scenes how do they make you feel any other brilliant moments of composition you love let us know in the comments below tune in on Facebook every other Thursday after a movie list at 2:00 p.m. Eastern see us respond and be sure to subscribe for more brilliant moments and Cinna fix movie lists

Channel: CineFix - IGN Movies and TV

Views: 804,818

Keywords: movie lists, top 3, 3 brilliant moments, visuals of emotion, shawshank redemption, 12 years a slave, children of men, cinefix, filmmaking, composition, framing, cinematic visuals

Id: NDFTFFA0LtE

Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 26 2016