Cinematography Influence

A series of cinematographers that i like and influence on the cinematography project I'm doing.

The first is By Robert Richardson

Who worked on Shutter Island a film by Martin Scorsese, as well as the aviator and Tarantino's film Inglorious Basterds.

These are some excerpts from a interview which he did.

Scorsese’s goal was to place viewers directly in Teddy’s shoes, and he wanted to convey the character’s fluctuating mental state with a variety of visual cues, primarily utilizing color and lighting. “The lighting, color and texture all contribute to the blurring of reality and hallucination, raising the question of what is subjective vs. objective,” says Richardson. “Marty plays with this blurring of lines throughout the film, I think with great prowess. The film is a journey within one man’s mind, and what you see could be real or imagined.”

You can definitely see this in the film with the uses of composition but also with the use a lighting and effects, as well as the film used, which gives different texture

The film’s color palette alternates between a slightly desaturated look, used for the present day, and the saturated look of 1950s-era Kodachrome, used mainly for Teddy’s memories and hallucinations. Scorsese’s initial inspiration for tapping the Kodachrome look was director/cinematographer George Stevens’ 16mm Kodachrome footage of the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau

George Stevens an American film director. The main character is a war veteran who saw a concentration camp

Rob Legato methodically analyzed the inherent characteristics of Kodachrome, using a vast library from the 1950s, and created a look-up table that enabled us to achieve something similar in the digital intermediate. The extraordinary vibrancy of color became the key to Teddy’s dream states.”

Look up tables are used on colour correction to apply a even look or a specific "look" through out the whole film.