Back to Blog
Watch amelie6/13/2023 They didn’t let poor lighting bog them down and managed to make every scene work without the film appearing lit in the artificial sense. It must have been hard, shooting in exterior situations on a low budget. To bring this to life without everything turning tacky is a monumental collective effort by all departments.Ĭinematographer Bruno Delbonnel tried to marry naturalistic location lighting with a sense of charm and romanticism. It’s supposedly set in Paris, but such a world possibly never existed except in the director’s imagination. ![]() Excruciating care was placed in the tiniest of details of Amelie’s life. It’s not for nothing the film received Academy Award nominations for art and cinematography among others. This is not to say the production design didn’t play its part. The main colors in the film – green, yellow and red – were inspired by the paintings of the Brazilian artist Juarez Machado. Most of the credit goes to extensive color grading, which unfortunately led to countless films and commercials being green or blue over the next decade. These colors were not completely achieved in production. You can watch it here:īlue is a color that appears like a breath of fresh air from time to time. ![]() As I’ve explained in my video on how films are shot in two colors – the primary colors of Amélie are red and green. The majorly green hue was risky but paid off. One of the major contributions of Amélie to cinema was in color grading. The exception to this happens with over the shoulder shots. The characters are framed mostly in the center. This discipline is one of the reasons it works. You’d think with a film of such visual flair the director could easily have framed this more traditionally, but he doesn’t. A great example is an early unassuming scene where Amélie speaks to her landlady. Up or down, sideways, dollying in or out – there’s hardly a shot where the camera doesn’t move. The camera technique is not often appreciated in Amelie, but shots like the one with Amélie on the bridge are one of the finest you’ll ever see in cinema. Like Leone, Jeunet films in the spherical format and crops rather than film anamorphic. One of the techniques Jean-Pierre Jeunet uses extensively is the character popping into frame, inspired directly by Sergio Leone. The camera angles and movements are fluid and vibrant. ![]() Let’s face it, it’s the world we all wish we could have, especially in the last two years. With Amélie he goes one eighty to a colorful and cheerful world where only good things can happen – even when events are bad. He did dark with Delicatessen and Alien: Resurrection. Jean-Pierre Jeunet can push the visuals both ways – dark or cheerful. ![]() You feel you are watching a comic book come alive. Just watch Alien: Resurrection.Īmélie was a response to the restrictions Jeunet had to endure in Hollywood. The actors are almost caricatures of the roles they are playing. It is clear visually he loves to create a rich tapestry and mise-en-scene that lets his actors shine in. This distorts the facial features in a way that lends to his type of comedy. He can frame characters in close up in the foreground while showing us the world they live in. Jean-Pierre Jeunet loves super wide angles – wider than most directors. On 28 September 1997, Amélie Poulain finds love.Understanding the Cinematography of Bruno Delbonnel When Amélie finds the album of photos of an intriguing collector that collects rejected photos in the Photomaton of the Gare de l'Est, she seeks him out and falls in love with him. She convinces her father to travel abroad using his garden gnome she helps her neighbor that is an outcast and lonely painter and the super that misses her unfaithful husband she also helps her hypochondriac colleague that works in the tobacco shop and the man that stalks the other waitress acting like cupid she plays pranks to an employer that mistreats his employee with abusive relationship. He seeks out the man and when she witnesses his happiness, she decides to become the "godmother of the rejected", anonymously helping people that are her acquaintances using her fantasy and little tricks. On 30 August 1997, Amélie finds a child treasure hidden behind the wall that belonged to a dweller from the 50's, and she decides to anonymously return it to the owner. Her mother dies in a weird accident and when the shy and daydreamer Amélie Poulain becomes a young woman, she moves to central Paris and works as waitress in the café Deux Moulins in Montmartre. In 1974, in Enghien in the northern suburbs of Paris, the girl Amélie Poulain was born and raised alone by her cold hearted father and her stressed mother due to a mistake of her father's evaluation of her heart conditions.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |