Researching particular elements of Wes Anderson's cinemagraphic style for inspiration in developing my own style to be reflected in my designs for the design production for print Wes Anderson project (which can be found, in development, on my Design Practice blog). Although, personally, I find all of his shots and cinematic devices fascinating, the one that stands out the most, and is frequently used, is the rostrum shot- where images are taken from a "God's eye view" (similarly used by directors such as Scorsese and Hitchcock) for a very personal and unique image.
I would really like to experiment with this style, photographically, for my design outcomes. Here are a few examples, including a fantastic breakdown of Wes Anderson's camera stagings, and some
sourced research images.
http://colorfulanimationexpressions.blogspot.com/2011/02/fantastic-mr-fox-flat-staging-and.html
Fantastic Mr. Fox: Flat Staging and Camera Moves (4/5)
Over the years, Wes Anderson has found a way to translate his
visions into pictures as rigid as if they were drawn with a ruler and a
spirit level. Since he obviously likes to control every single detail in
his films it’s astounding how long it took him to finally end up in
animation.
As we have already seen, many of his distancing trademarks translate
very smoothly into animation, others can even be exaggerated due to the
stylized nature of the medium.
If you look at any Anderson film from
Rushmore on you’ll notice the many top shots (or “God’s eye view” as used by Scorsese and Hitchcock)
and slow tracking shots. Already quite distinct in the beginning,
Anderson and his director of photography on all live-action films, Robert Yeoman, have perfected their system of preferred framings into a very rigid concept.
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| top shot inserts (left TRT, right TDL). |
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| TRT: from relative close-up on detail (left) to top shot of characters (right). |
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| left (TRT): god's eye view like point-of-view of a character, right (TDL): no character could see this perspective. |
Note: On
Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson worked with DP Tristan Oliver
for the first time. While all the style choices seem to be straight Wes
Anderson, there’s hardly any wide-angle distortion visible and it’s his
first film since Rushmore that is not filmed in cinemascope.
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| Top row: top shot inserts aka rostrum camera shots; bottom row: god's eye view on characters. |
Central perspective
Anderson’s preference for central perspective first cropped up in a few right-angled top shot inserts in his debut Bottle Rocket. In Rushmore, he started to favor flat setups with the camera perpendicular to the background.
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| left: The Royal Tenenbaums (TRT), right: The Darjeeling Limited (TDL) |
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| central perspective and symmetry in TRT. |
He kept shooting most of the dialogue scenes in standard overshoulder
style. There are a few instances of point-of-view shots, though, that
are straight on. In later films (starting with The Royal Tenenbaums
(TRT)) these straight-on point-of-view shots become independent from
the actual characters so that there is a feeling that the camera is an
additional character in the room. Henceforth, virtually all the
conversations are filmed either full frontal or in profile with the
camera always horizontally perpendicular to the background or the
speaking character. This way, the characters often seem to speak almost
directly into the camera.
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| shot - reverse shot in Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (LAWSZ) |
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| TRT: The camera usually stands on the axis, and makes 180° turns during conversations. |
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| LAWSZ: The
characters looks slightly to the side of the camera although they sit in
the middle of the frame. This way they avoid breaking the fourth wall. |
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| Conversation over a very long dinner table: |
To achieve something of a standard shot – reverse-shot continuity with
the characters to the left and right side respectively, he still places
the camera perpendicular to the background, but the characters are not
sitting or standing in the middle.
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| one of the rare overshoulder shots in TRT |
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| TRT: The background is in central perspective, the second character is not centered, however. |
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| LAWSZ: The same, only with Bill Murray even more on the edge. |
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| LAWSZ: The off-center character can have overshoulder shots without blocking his opposite. |
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| Same here with Kylie and Fox. |
This flat staging also emphasizes the lightness and
comedy potential of the story as opposed to the more angular deep focus
staging of more dramatic films. Mark Kennedy has extensively written about it here. Especially the central perspective wide-angle long shots are reminiscent of theatrical staging.
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| We either get the characters in profile... |
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| ...or full frontal. |
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| upper row:
profile and full frontal in same frame, lower row: the same, but there's
a 90° turn from lower left to lower right so that profile and frontal
are reversed. This also shows us that we're not looking at the stage
from outside but can assume positions within. |
There seems to be an exception to this strange 90°-rule: on the vertical
axis, the camera can assume almost any angle, low or high.
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| high angle shots. |
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| low angle shots to make the characters look more powerful to limit of distortion (upper left). |
Doll house aesthetics
Some of the right-angle shots are not connected by a cut but by a whip
pan of approximately 90° (sometimes 120° if characters are blocked in a
triangle). This can be seen most often in The Darjeeling Limited
(TDL) when the three brothers (sometimes including the mother) are
having three- or fourway conversations. Speaking of whip pans and Indian
movies: there is a similarly turning whip pan from one setup of a face
to a central perspective framing of a doorway in Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955).
While it’s nothing unusual to have the camera follow a character throughout a scene (think of Scorsese’s
GoodFellas or Raging Bull),
Anderson often organizes his camera moves in straight lines, horizontal
and vertical (dolly as well as steadycam shots). Like the fixed camera
setups, the tracking shots are increasingly limited to 90° angles.
Again, the feeling that the camera is a very limited character itself or
is carried by an omniscient narrator is emphasized.
Especially since
TRT, Anderson often shows sets in cross-section
so that we can see how the characters’ environments relate to each
other. The outer circumstances are always straightforward and easily
manageable, yet the characters’ inner life seems to be confused to the
point that they are paralyzed emotionally. Anderson also likes to frame
his characters within the frame.
These cross-sections involuntarily remind me of a doll-house. So it’s
not surprising that this rather mechanical, distancing effect works best
in
Fantastic Mr. Fox, where the sets actually are doll-houses.
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| TRT: like mocking his own concept Anderson shows us a stage model with pencil to get the size relations. |
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| In LAWSZ we see the whole ship in cross-section. There's no way we believe this to be a true ship out on the see. |
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| TRT: Like the windows of an advent calender we see the separately framed characters in one frame. |
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| TRT: left: Margot is framed by curtains; right: the children are framed by the bench under which they lie. |
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| TRT: here the
characters are less obviously framed, left: by the door, right: by the
background wall. The "chameleon concept" enhances the effect. |
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| Most often the characters are framed by windows or door frames. |
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| left: windows and doors, right: cooking area as framing device. |
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| left: the resulting pattern effect is also picked up in this split screen top shot; right: geometrically patterned split screen. |
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| Screens in the back provide split screen effect and frame-within-frame. |
Flat staging to the max
While classically hand-drawn animation often tries to painstakingly
simulate depth by way of multiplane devices, it is fairly easy to create
natural depth out of a stop-motion set by just filming it from a
natural angle. Yet, there have always been artists who favored flat
staging to compress the filmic space into a relatively two-dimensional
world. In this context, Anderson’s basic approach doesn’t stand out as
much as in his live-action films. However, he is able to expand his
concept.
The
evolution of the doll house cross section in four examples (many more
in the actual films) from TRT, LAWSZ, TDL and Fox. I have removed the
sound so it doesn't distract from the camera moves.
Depth cues can be altered by using different lenses to photograph a set,
but in puppet animation the set can also be built to the desired
specifications. While there are sets that expand far into the
background, others are more compressed. Especially in doll-house scenes
and tracking shots the sets are built increasingly flat. Sometimes they
are hardly distinguishable in style from Mrs. Fox’ paintings (which are allegedly painted by Wes Anderson’s brother Eric Chase Anderson who also voices Kristofferson in the film [UPDATE: according to Christian De Vita, the storm paintings were done by Turlo Griffin (see comments below)]).
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| Here we have depth by having two planes of action, one in the background, one in the foreground. |
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| This is one of the rare examples of deep staging with a real horizon that is far away. |
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| Usually, even in
spatially deeper sets, the view is limited by objects in the near
background that prevent us from seeing the horizon. Most often these are
walls or houses. |
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| Here we have walls and mountains to limit the space. Nevertheless this is about as deep as it gets in this movie. |
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| Most of the interior scenes are staged really flat (theatrical again). |
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| Also this exterior looks rather flat because we have no real depth cues except for the train size in background. |
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| This top shot is from a helicopter and looks similar to the paintings of Mrs. Fox. |
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| These three-dimensionally constructed long shots look rather flat/two-dimensional |
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| These are all framegrabs from the same horizontal camera move to the right. |
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| As soon as the animals start digging, Anderson resorts heavily to cross-section dollhouse shots. |
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| With this being the most extreme. The set looks almost like a two-dimensional painting. |
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| In the end, the sewer system is revealed to us in a mechanical camera move. |
Speaking of these paintings: we’re in England and it
never rains, there’s not even a hint where she gets the inspiration for
her thunderstorm depictions.
By the way, there are some point-of-view camera setups, some of them reminiscent of ego-shooter game mode:
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| The one on the
right is technically no POV, as we see the character's head in the
picture, it looks more like a camera mounted to a dog. |
Some examples of my own photographs, taken in a rostrum style- largely used to glorify cakes, trinkets and exquisite objects- hopefully reflecting the stature and celebration of the hypothetical film festival.
Here, a great example of how well rostrum shots work for books or zines- could be an interesting concept to create, say, a poster design of a book/publication within the poster- definitely one to experiment with.
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