Definition of visual culture

Visual Culture refers to the way of life of individuals to observe the world’s external objects through specific visual texts. As a way of life, visual culture includes the individual’s visual planning of self-life, as well as the ability to visually decode objects, people and relationships in daily life. The visual texts include specific texts such as paintings, pictures, movies, fashion, and decorations-generally speaking, human beings have the ability to better copy reality to grasp real cultural trends through simulation.

For example, a few hundred years ago, people had no impression of people outside their home country. To understand foreign countries, they could only use scriptures, or they would ride a boat to read them, and then use words or maps after reading them. That is to say, people are not used to it. To grasp the world with vision, we use words to abstract things that we don’t understand. After the Renaissance, people gradually began to truly describe the world around us and even the invention of film and television. We can transfer the real world we see to images. Going to the world is different from hundreds of years ago. Even though you have never been to New York, you also know what the Statue of Liberty looks like. Her color and posture can be displayed in your head. Our grasp of the world is no longer abstract. It’s concrete.

Mise-en-scene

I have learned the basic concepts of mise-en-scene in the second week. In this week I want to talk about mise-en-scene in 3D animation movies.

First of all, 3D animated movies and traditional live-action movies belong to the category of movies. From the perspective of scheduling itself, the difference is not too big. But in terms of form, the operability of 3D animation movies is much higher than that of traditional live-action movies.
For example, in traditional live-action movies, due to the real existence of environmental space, many technical methods are needed to make up for these shortcomings. And 3D animation films have no principled restrictions, as long as they can meet the director’s explanation of the shots, they can basically be achieved.
Once there was a company preparing to shoot a shot about the Capital Airport. The director needed the camera to follow the trajectory of the plane from the Capital Airport to the night sky and see the Shunyi District. I chose a variety of aerial photography vehicles before to realize this shot, but unfortunately, I decided to use 3D animation to simulate the real scene when shooting.
After all, the weather cannot be controlled during the shooting. How to synchronize the trajectory of the camera and the aircraft without losing the sense of the picture, plus my country’s air traffic control area is relatively large, etc., it is easy to destroy the expected effect.
The advantage of traditional live-action movies is that they can portray rich expressions and convey more real body movements to the audience. Of course, this requires very good actors to complete. If the actor’s own acting skills are more general, it will also be counterproductive. The expressions and body of the animation, judging from the current situation, it is indeed difficult to reach the height of a real-life performance. Although motion capture technology has become popular in China, due to the cost of equipment and the shortcomings of operating technology, it cannot fully meet the needs of high-end animation movies.
For example, in an animated film released in 2015, there are many unreasonable tremors and amplitudes of the characters, which affects the viewability of the entire animated film. However, there will be more and more trends in the future, which should be closer to CG movies that combine traditional real-life and 3D animation. If such an industrial system and production process are gradually formed in China, the difference in scheduling will become smaller and smaller.
But the actual situation now is that the storyboard is only used as a reference in traditional live-action movies; the storyboard must be used for instructions in 3D animated movies.
Traditional live-action movies are limited by the industrial environment and pay more attention to on-site scheduling; 3D animation movies can only be scheduled in virtual spaces, so there are fewer restrictions and more play.

Visual metaphor

Nichts auf der Welt ist keine Methapher. 
——Goethe

“Everything in the world is a metaphor” This sentence comes from Goethe, and was taken by Haruki Murakami in 海辺のカフカ , which was borrowed from the character Oshima in the book. I always think this is a wonderful sentence, and the tool “metaphor” is also one of the important charms of literary works, especially movies.
Movies are a complex art category. Containing multiple elements such as vision, hearing, literary drama, etc., “metaphor” can be used in a convenient and wide range, almost inclusive.
There are many purposes of “metaphor”, and the major categories are nothing more than digging deeper connotations or to put things in a different way.
For the former, Freud’s theory of sexual psychology undoubtedly occupies an important position. No matter how outdated Freud’s theory is from a scientific point of view, but from the perspective of film and literary works, the metaphorical aesthetics of Freud’s theory has been fully carried forward. From Japanese-style horrors such as Silent Hill to monster designs such as aliens, sexual psychological hints have an important position and are one of the sources of the charm of these movie designs.

This kind of sustenance of the author’s ideas through something implied under the surface of a certain “thing” is undoubtedly the most common use of metaphor.

The huge statue of Monroe in “Carnival” and the story it experienced are also such metaphors. But more than that, the female characters of different age groups in “Carnival” may also be metaphors on another level-they are very similar to the different age groups experienced by the same person, in the same despicable and cold world. In the end it became a cruel “same destination by different routes.”

This kind of sustenance of the author’s ideas through something implied under the surface of a certain “thing” is undoubtedly the most common use of metaphor.

The huge statue of Monroe in Angels Wear White and the story it experienced are also such metaphors. But more than that, the female characters of different age groups in Angels Wear White may also be metaphors on another level-they are very similar to the different age groups experienced by the same person, in the same despicable and cold world. In the end, it became a cruel “same destination by different routes.”

This kind of sustenance of the author’s ideas through something implied under the surface of a certain “thing” is undoubtedly the most common use of metaphor.

The huge statue of Monroe in Angels Wear White and the story it experienced are also such metaphors. But more than that, the female characters of different age groups in Angels Wear White may also be metaphors on another level-they are very similar to the different age groups experienced by the same person, in the same despicable and cold world. In the end, it became a cruel “same destination by different routes.”

The ending scenes are full of emotions that are hard to express, like hope and despair.

Aesthetics

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Art Director: Adam Stockhausen

In the “Budapest Hotel” known for its use of color and architecture, many scenes are hand-made. The second collaboration between Weiss and art director Adam Stockhausen created a pre-war and post-war composition Calm the world.

People who have watched The Grand Budapest Hotel will not forget this iconic pink building. This architectural scene design is warm and sweet like candy, using two completely different effects in the same space.

We can use different decorations to convey wealth and fantasies in this movie, but also sink the sad reality and past. The whole film also undergoes dramatic changes through color, furniture and design.

Color composition

Complementary colors

Complementary color refers to the contrast effect formed by two corresponding colors, and it is also the most extensive color matching mode today. Two colors of warm color and cool color are used to emphasize the contrast and enhance the vivid and prominent effect. The most common examples are orange, blue, and teal, which is why most Hollywood blockbusters use these two colors as the color effects of movies. However, when using the complementary color mode, its saturation must be adjusted appropriately so that the contrast effect is pleasing to the eye rather than dazzling.

The above two pictures are the corresponding color cards in the movie Amelie, which is a typical corresponding effect of red and green. Usually two contrasting colors symbolize conflicting behaviors, and the appearance of external complementary colors indicates that the character is in a state of contradiction or mental and physical conflict.

Fight Club is a perfect interpretation of the corresponding combination of orange and blue-green. The dark part is represented by blue-green, and the bright part is represented by orange, just like a person’s heart is filled with various positive and negative thoughts to attack a complete individual.

Similar colors

Similar colors refer to the composition of adjacent colors on the hue circle to present the overall color coordination in the movie. The color combination between each other is more flexible, and it is not a warm or cool color, so it will not show the strong and tense effect like the complementary color mode. Usually, similar colors are used as the scenic tones in movies to present a natural and soft feeling. The most common mode is to choose a main color system, and choose a similar color for matching, and finally use black, white and grey as a foil.

A scene in American Hustle uses red, orange, brown, and yellow colors to connect with each other, making the overall tone of the film biased toward a warm atmosphere, and the picture contains almost no tension.

Ternary color

The ternary color means that the three colors are separated by 120 degrees on the hue circle. Although the overall color saturation is not too high, it still gives people a sense of vitality. However, the third-class distribution color is the most unpopular color mode in the movie, but it will still show amazing effects when used properly.

Rectangular color

Rectangular color matching is composed of two sets of complementary colors, usually with a colorful sense of colorful, but at least one main color to highlight its effect.

Rhythm

I think “rhythm” is the most important part of the movie. It can even be said that rhythm is the life of the movie. Many outstanding film artists emphasize rhythm and rhythm, such as Akira Kurosawa, Rossellini, Pudovkin, Tarkovsky…. This is because the rhythm of the film is an important part of the artistic beauty of the film. The personality of art.
Regarding the rhythm of art and film, theorists have not clearly defined it, and most of them are based on music. Ingmar Bergman once said based on his creative experience: “There is no art in the world that is more like a movie than music.” Indeed, there are many rules in the use of techniques between music and movies. The similarity is that when the film uses sound and picture as the form of expression, the rhythm is more embodied in the repetition and distribution of time and space performance and the form of time and space changes. In movies, images with similar characteristics are often distributed in multiple places in space and repeated in time, and the interval of such repetition and distribution is arbitrary. On this basis, the audiovisual elements with stable characteristics are usually used as the fulcrum of the movement of things, and the audiovisual elements with dynamic and unstable characteristics form the gradual development of things. Through the regular and logical movement pattern between the fulcrum and the expansion, the inherent regularity of the rhythmic movement of the film is reflected. Grasping this point is the key to understanding the rhythm.
What are the characteristics of movie rhythm?
First of all, the film rhythm is a coercive psychological effect directly on the audience. The psychological feelings of the audience and the film creator’s grasp of the film rhythm are mutually influencing.
On the one hand, the creator must find a way to use precise ideas-involving the composition, sound, performance, light and shadow, movement, color, etc. in each frame of the picture, to cater to the audience’s psychological induction; on the other hand, they must appropriately add themselves His creative style guides the audience to a certain extent. The same is true for the audience. While trying to feel the rhythm of the film, they also constantly add their own subjective feelings. Therefore, the rhythm of the movie is not only a sensory effect embodied in the audio-visual aspect, but more importantly the psychological effect produced thereby. Moreover, the rhythm of a film is completed at one time, which requires the audience to have a certain understanding and sensitivity to the rhythm of the film, and also requires the artist to create a film with high accuracy in the rhythm.
Secondly, the rhythm of the film does not exist independently, or a special technique used exclusively, but exists and is integrated into the weaving and application of various audiovisual languages. Therefore, another feature of the film rhythm is the integrity of the comprehensive composition of film audiovisual methods. Rhythm is very rich in the form of expression in the film, that is, it exists in the script of the play and the director, but also in the creative departments of photography, art, performance, recording, editing, etc.; it exists in the overall conception and overall feeling of the film, and also exists In every field, every shot, every sound and relationship of the split body.

The excellent film rhythm technique is by no means a pure artistic technique, it can reflect the artist’s unique creation and ingenuity, the creator’s understanding and grasp of life, and the understanding and pursuit of beauty. It can be said that the creation of the film rhythm should be based on the plot, the needs of the scene, the characterization and the psychological needs of the audience, and then the comprehensive use of the film’s audio-visual means, which is the result of the overall grasp of the entire film.