director jeffrey zablotny

mad men - the quality of mercy
dir. phil abraham

‘tremolo’

here’s a brand new spot i directed for the toronto institute for the enjoyment of music.

uncle boonmee who can recall his past lives (2010)
dir. apichatpong weerasethakul

mysterious, tantalizingly oblique filmmaking with well-chosen moments that subvert the rules of traditional cinematic perspective, geography, and point of view.  like much of the film, these choices are more to be felt than understood, so i’ll try to focus more on the mechanics and less on their significance.

1 to 4: sitting, eating dinner, the family/group hears boonsong before he arrives.  we’re shown static images of the mountain and jungle with no movement, indirectly asked by the characters to focus on what we hear (“what’s that sound?”).  we cut back to the family, who turn towards camera, and then we cut to see what they’re looking at: boonsong climbing up the stairs to join them.

so what perspective is the mountain and the jungle, really?  is anyone present even able to ‘see’ it?  we can start by ruling things out — it is not the omniscient horror/suspense perspective where the camera is placed in special positions for the audience to learn information before the characters onscreen do.  it isn’t even omniscient in an ambiguous way — in this film, shots are consistently tied to characters.  at the height of the film’s most surreal moments, we feel the imagery through the characters even if there isn’t a literal or direct connection to their line of sight because we see them seeing.  in this case, we feel this is some approximation of roong’s perspective (he’s in the red shirt) since he’s looking into the brush when we cut back to the dinner table.

5 and 6: here’s another good example of this kind of perspective: in the same scene, jen leaves the table during boonsong’s story to gaze at the farm, and we cut to the farm.  the director does not seem concerned with accurately recreating jen’s perspective; we know everyone is on the second floor of the house, but in this ‘reverse’ of the farm, the camera is more or less on the ground.  there’s also nothing done to create concrete geography for us — no one’s shoulder is dirty in the frame, there’s no familiar landmark or reference point.  still, we know this is jen’s perspective somehow, since we cut back to her from the same angle, slightly closer.

7 and 8: the princess looks at her catfish-engineered reflection.  this is completely different from the other sequences i was describing before since we’re directly inside this character’s point of view.  we see her reflection, then we see her looking at the reflection.  the slightly wider focal length when we look up at the princess is part of what makes this so haunting.

9 and 10: tong sees himself watching television, seemingly moments earlier.  we see him looking off-camera, and then we cut to what he’s looking at.  this is a more traditional use of perspective and point of view to show something surreal and unexpected.  when we see the group watching television, the camera is very closely approximating his perspective, but the coverage does not give us any part of tong observing in the foreground (dirty).  it’s worth nothing that by this time in the scene, we’re intimately familiar with the room’s geography, so we know where everything is supposed to be.  

to finish up, here’s cinematographer roger deakins discussing clean and dirty coverage in the context of clean singles, (a ‘clean single’ being a shot with only one person in it, without anyone else in the foreground).  

“I think the Coens generally prefer singles. Singles tend to put the viewer right inside a conversation and can be, perhaps, more intense. I would say that overs [over the shoulder shot] give a more observational feel depending on the length of the lens used but they also give interesting possibilities for framing. Much of the time I find the choice quite personal and intuitive. I don’t really prefer one to the other.”

the key here is his comment that clean singles can be ‘more intense’.  in the case of ‘boonmee’, there’s something confrontational and starkly compelling about the choice to have so much clean coverage.

‘photos every day’

this is a spot by tbwa/chiat/day for apple, called ‘photos every day’.  the craft is fantastic, and there’s some subtle, unusual attention to detail in it.

let’s take a look at the sound mix.  here’s a waveform of the spot:

and now here’s the waveform of a conventionally mixed spot — this is that ‘old spice’ commercial everyone flipped out for a couple years ago.  it might as well be any ad you see on tv today.

huge difference.  there’s incredible restraint in the amount of compression applied to the music in ‘photos every day’.  (from wikipedia, compression “reduces the volume of loud sounds or amplifies quiet sounds by narrowing or “compressing” an audio signal’s dynamic range”.)  my point here is that if you caught this on tv, it would be substantially ‘quieter’ sounding than other ads around it.

the other interesting thing about the mix is that the iPhone shutter click sound is substantially undermixed.  it comes across as incidental, and unobtrusive.  the ambiences are the real star here, and the sound editor wasn’t even afraid to drop them out entirely for effect (see snowy skyscraper, 0:23).

other observations:

• there’s a real nice match-cut at 0:06 of the guy jumping off his skateboard into the shot of the jogger running.
• 0:25, the iPhone bobs up and down at a concert, and halfway through, the shot itself starts bobbing with the phone, keeping the screen stationary in the frame.
• overall, there’s a very careful variety of perspective, scale, and involvement.  are we peering over someone’s shoulder?  watching from across the street?  ostensibly taking the picture, ourselves?
• i could have done without the voiceover at the end.

the red shoes (1948)
dir. michael powell & emeric pressburger

another round:
the hudsucker proxy (1994)
dir. joel & ethan coen
cinematographer roger deakins

the hudsucker proxy (1994)
dir. joel & ethan coen
cinematographer roger deakins