#composistion

Baekho made this Look Remix MONTHS AGO and posted this snippet to his insta!

Intent: Ozurie - feeling torn between the life you want and the life you have

Music: Seraph by DPR IAN

Form: Live Dance

Sections: 3

POVs and angles are incredibly useful to help covey certain messages to the audience, or even to make a certain scene look interesting, rather than using standard types of shots this allows cinematographers to experiment with how a film will look and as a result can help a films longevity if used correctly, and sparingly. In this section i’ll show some examples of these camera positions and then discuss them. 

First off disusing the use in POV shots. POV or Point Of View shots are used to put the audience into the shoes of the main character to create a feeling of intimacy and immersion. The POV can be used in a variety of ways, to scare audiences, like in horror films, making the scares effect the audience more, as the monster is not only chancing the main character but can make the audience feel as thought they are also being chanced by the monster, and is a very useful tool for conveying information in a scene. However the example i’m going to be looking at is from the film “Hardcore Henry” ( 2015  Ilya Naishuller ) which is a film thats shot entirely in POV.

From a narrative stand point the use in POVs makes scene, with the main character being a cyborg with a camera in his head this tells the audience that they are viewing the film through the lenses of a camera, like most other films however, this camera is attached to the main characters head, giving not only a narrative purpose to the use in POV but also a practical way to shorten the films length and cut scenes without having jarring cuts that ruin the action, “cuts” can be explained as “glitches”. In other films the switch from, what i like to call 3rd person camera to a POV can be quite jarring, as we switch from being observers to being immediately in the main characters shoes and forced to experience what they are going through, and whilst this can be a great move if your looking to build tension, when your just using it for a cheep jump scare it can wear thin, Hardcore Henry on the other hand fixes this by having the whole film take place in the first person, and as such gradually leads the audience into the characters shoes, until they are fully immersed in the film, and once they are it allows the audience to experience the events and the mass amount of stunts littered throughout the film first hand, whilst many a film has also been able to accomplish the feeling of “putting the audience into the characters shoes” I don’t feel that they fully accomplish this without the use of POV, whilst many have been close, such as “Spiderman 2″ ( 2004  Sam Raimi ) with its grand sweeping shots always keeping the audience on edge, POV manages to do the same thing, but on a more personal and immersive level.

Next, I’ll discuss the use in angles, starting with the most important in my option, the use in high angles.

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Starting by talking about the movie Psycho ( 1960 Alfred Hitchcock ) and one of its most scary scenes, the stairs scene wherein Detective Arbogast meets his fate at the top of the stairs. I could talk forever about the tense filled lead up to the shot, but I wish to talk about this shot in particular and how the use in angles shows his position in the story.  Within the scene the character is walking up a flight of stairs, in a narrative scene the character is the weak one, as proven much later in scene when he’s killed off, this forum of foreshadowing is shown by the effective use in angles, when in the high angle shows him as smaller due to the nature, showing that he himself is NOT the dominant figure in this scene and that he doesn't have full control over his actions, almost as if someone else is puppeteering him. This high angle also acts somewhat like a POV for the audience, creating somewhat of a false comfort to the scene, as if you as an audience member was looking down onto the character slowly making his way up the stairs, only for the scene to suddenly change to a murder scene as it does.

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This shot from “Pulp Fiction” ( 1994  Quentin Tarantino ) Demonstrates the other end of the use in Angles, the Low angle, which in turn also helps to convey a completely different message than high angle shots, instead of framing characters as weaker or insignificant, the low angle aims to make characters look as menacing and dominant as possible, making them look bigger than they already are. In this example Character 1 (Samuel L Jackson) is the dominating character, holding a gun and outright threatening the man on the chair, constantly shouting and shooting at him, this use in framing and angles tells the audience that hes the dominating force in the scene as he’s a physical giant in the room, towering over the remaining characters, and giving him a feeling of presence.

Now I’ll begin talking about tilted angles, or what they became mostly known as, Dutch angles. The Dutch angle has various uses, however in this blog i’ll be discussing their two major uses, 1st to give a feeling of dominance, much like the other two angles.

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As per mentioned, angles can be used to show a dominance within the room, much like how the other two angles were used, this shot in particular from the show “Kaiji: Against all Rules” ( 2011  Yūzō Satō) shows our main character Kaiji sitting off to the right of the frame, with the camera tilted in the same way, almost as if him just sitting is bringing the camera down, showing that his weight is tilting the whole frame in his favour again, establishing him as the dominate figure, or at least one that will become dominant, as the episodes lead to a lot of trail and error for the main character, however in this shot, shows that he’s a lot of weight and dominance to the events.

The second use in Dutch angles I wish to talk about is the use in disorienting the audience and giving a feeling of nausea 

( Image 4 )