Robert And Richard Carroll

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Director of Photography Breakdown - Roger Deakins

Roger Deakins. A man who has developed the irrefutablereputation of a cinematographer with unmatched consistency. If he works on amovie, it looks good. His style is often referenced for what we have come toexpect in aesthetically pleasing contemporary cinema. In this post I willattempt to break down constant techniques he uses and develop through linesbetween films.

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Wide Shot

Deakins is a master of the extreme wide shot.Perfect lens choice and composition allow him to establish space like no other.Often these shots are used at the beginning or end of a scene to lead us intoor ease us out of a moment. I find that when I experience shots like thisviscerally, with the character, it provides a perfect entrance into the headspace of the characters within the scene. The shot from Skyfall (upper middle shot) is not only incredible to look at, but it is used as an opener to establish the emotional turmoil he is experiencing by returning to the harsh and unrelenting landscape of his childhood. In the top shot from True Grit, the shot is used to establish the isolation and privacy Mattie hops to experience when visiting the grave of Rooster.

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Establishing Shots

I think these are my personal favourites when it comes to Deakins work. Every establishing shot is on point. Not only are they all composed to perfection, but the slight tweaks in variety keep them interesting. I found 4 examples in which the subjects are never in the same part of the frame. On top of that, he uses leading lines and lens choice to create depth and completely establishes colour palette for every scene with these awesome shots.

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Mid Shots

Although there are only two examples here, they are the perfect ones to represent the strength in Deakins’ mid shots. For the first shot, both the vertical and horizontal thirds are filled with interesting material. It creates immediate depth with the shallower depth of field, with the closer out of focus grass, the subject and then finally the fence trees and sky outside the focal plane. In the second shot from Prisoners it demonstrates Deakins’ excellent use of the leading lines in the desk to draw our eye to the subject in the center of the frame. It is also a perfect representation of his use of practical’s to light a subject in low light.

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Close Ups

The Hotel Chelsea

*If I was a gamer I’d probably be way into this.

https://howwegettonext.com/the-power-of-play-a-reading-list-a3aebda330d#.oguk0emvu

Dive Deeper

Alright, now we’re opening the floodgates. If you’re going on a trip and want to fill your read-it-later client of choice with fantastic writing (in no particular order), then we’ve got your back.

Master of Play: The Many Worlds of a Video-Game Artist Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker [46-minute read]

The Odyssey of Captain Beefheart Langdon Winner, Rolling Stone [27-minute read]

The Pleasures of Imagination Paul Bloom, The Chronicle of Higher Education [13-minute read]

The Chess Master and the Computer Gary Kasparov, The New York Review of Books [18-minute read]

J. J. Abrams on the Magic of Mystery J. J. Abrams, Wired [12-minute read]

Why Free Play Is the Best Summer School Jessica Lahey, The Atlantic [4-minute read]

Playing With History: What Sid Meier’s Video Game Empire Got Right and Wrong About ‘Civilization’ Kanishk Tharoor, Kill Screen [15-minute read]

The Anti-Helicopter Parent’s Plea: Let Kids Play! Melanie Thernstrom, The New York Times Magazine [23-minute read]

The Gleeful Contrarian Ray Sawhill, Salon [14-minute read]

Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die Patton Oswalt, Wired [13-minute read]

Game of Her Life: Africa’s Female Chess Prodigy Tim Crothers, ESPN [15-minute read]

War Without Humans: Modern Blood Rites Revisited Barbara Ehrenreich, Guernica [20-minute read]

Big Innovation Lives Right on the Edge of Ridiculous Ideas Jake Cook, 99u [7-minute read]

A Different Way to Play Noel Duan, Stanford Social Innovation Review [3-minute read]

The Dirty Secret Behind Real Innovation: How Our Urge to Play Invented the Future Steven Kotler, Singularity Hub [3-minute read]

JoAnn Shoe Queen 2

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Ads From The Past

From the twitter account ‘Cartoonists Pics’ comes this image of Daniel Clowes and Peter Bagge on the 1993 Hateball tour: 

Atop the pile of original art in front of the cake (?) is the art for Clowes’s “Curtain of Sanity.” The comic first appeared in National Lampoon in 1991 and was reprinted in Lout Rampage! and Twentieth Century Eightball.

Here’s the comic as it appears in Twentieth Century Eightball (which is still in-print); it has a new strip added at the bottom: