Continuing to change my dissertation this week, I have added subheadings to the title of my dissertation, and I intend to use Roger Deakins’ example to justify my title.
I went on to write the section on Research Methodology, as well as breaking out the topics and content of each chapter.
I changed the title of my thesis again this week. The previous title was hardly a worthwhile discussion; I couldn’t keep praising the talents of one director, and it would be too difficult and narrow to discuss just one director of photography with too many variables, so I changed it more to explore how the style of cinematographers has changed with the times and technology.
From this I will list some well-known directors of photography and films to help me complete my thesis.
As I continue to write my thesis this week, I’m gradually starting to open up my mind and throw out questions such as: How did Roger Deakins design the lens? How does he use similar shots to show completely different eras, plots under different films.
For the introduction section of my dissertation this week, I looked up a large number of books as well as papers on Roger Deakins and searched for several of his iconic, award-winning films such as: 《Blade Runner 2049》, 《1917》, focusing on his unique aesthetic in the field of photography.
I had a discussion with my teacher this week and decided to narrow down my thesis topic again. In my feedback from last semester, my teacher suggested that I should not focus on all types of films, but rather one film or director, and I wanted to be able to explore a film that had very specific and representative lighting, and explore how its cinematography affected the audience’s understanding of the characters and the course of the story.
Roger Deakins is a cinematographer I found in my search for direction. He served as director of photography for many films, and his lighting and shots are very distinctive, such as Blade Runner 2049, James Bond, etc. I wanted to use him as an entry point to find special films to discuss.
After changing the topic, I started designing the topic as well as finding material and started writing my dissertation. This week I wrote the abstract section and learnt something in class about how to write a dissertation and how to fake my way through a research topic.
This week has been about revising the range of topics, for example I have chosen specific productions to analyse what impact the shots and lighting have had on the plot and the audience, or finding different directors and comparing the different shots and lighting they have used for the same plot to illustrate the importance of shots and lighting.
Continue reading this week for more literature references, the design of lighting in Computer Graphics is directly derived from cinematography, and many digital artists follow the conventional wisdom on how lighting is set up to convey drama, appeal, or emotion. In this paper, we are interested in investigating the most commonly used lighting techniques to more formally determine their effect on our perception of animated virtual characters. Firstly, we commissioned a professional animator to create a sequence of dramatic emotional sentences for a typical CG cartoon character. Then, we rendered that character using a range of lighting directions, intensities, and shading techniques. Participants of our experiment rated the emotion, the intensity of the performance, and the appeal of the character. Our results provide new insights into how animated virtual characters are perceived, when viewed under different lighting conditions.( Wisessing, P., Dingliana, J., & McDonnell, R. (2016, July). Perception of lighting and shading for animated virtual characters. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception (pp. 25-29). )
I have come up with several questions that can be discussed on how to dig into the minor issues under the theme.
The teacher’s advice is to refer to Asian, American and British directors’ camera language and lighting, to compare them and to find out the different characteristics.
This week, based on my proposed dissertation topic, I started looking for references, mainly through ualibrary and Google Docs. I mainly looked for literature, books on film lenses, lighting, which explore topics that are good enough to support my dissertation and provide favourable evidence and help for my thesis.
Bibliography:
1.structure to communicate theme and mood. In Proceedings of the 2nd international symposium on SmKennedy, K., & Mercer, R. E. (2002, June). Planning animation cinematography and shot art graphics (pp. 1-8).
( Available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/569005.569006 )
2.Grodal, T. (2005). Film lighting and mood. Moving image theory: Ecological considerations, 152.
(Available at :
https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=zh-CN&lr=&id=qBLBSSjj1IoC&oi=fnd&pg=PA152&dq=film+lighting+mood&ots=16X3VYYeVz&sig=9Iiiy7JA-SEi6zNggVFOp9H-vzs&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=film%20lighting%20mood&f=falsehttps://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=zh-CN&lr=&id=qBLBSSjj1IoC&oi=fnd&pg=PA152&dq=film+lighting+mood&ots=16X3VYYeVz&sig=9Iiiy7JA-SEi6zNggVFOp9H-vzs&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=film%20lighting%20mood&f=false )
3.Frantz M, Crannell A. Viewpoints at the Movies: Forced Perspective and the Hitchcock Zoom[M]//Viewpoints. Princeton University Press, 2011: 135-138.
（Available at：https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781400839056-010/html?lang=de）
4.Katatikarn, J., & Tanzillo, M. (2016). Lighting for animation: The art of visual storytelling. Routledge.
( Available at: https://doi.org/10.1201/9781315779591 )
5.Wisessing, P., Dingliana, J., & McDonnell, R. (2016, July). Perception of lighting and shading for animated virtual characters. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception (pp. 25-29).
( Available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2931002.2931015 )
6.Kennedy, A. J. (2014). The effect of color on emotions in animated films (Doctoral dissertation, Purdue University).
(Available at:
https://www.proquest.com/openview/1f359b318d68435d8cd9c0330c6c5c6b/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750 )
7.Thayer, D. L. (1960). A Study of the Influence of Conventional Film Lighting on Audience Response. The University of Iowa.
( Available at:
https://www.proquest.com/openview/cd324f8f1d089eeb1d4b885558e86b27/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y )
The different shots and lighting tones reflect the different directions of the story and the characters.
Abstract
The author wanted to look at the language of the shots, and the lighting, and how they guide the audience, how different shots bring different characters to life, and how the lighting does too, how they give the audience a sense of what is going on in the mind first: the plot is going to change here, this character is so oppressive. This study is not intended to be limited to animated films, but to cover all types of films, and through this study it will be possible to have a better understanding of shots and lighting, and thus to make more progress in the production of short films. The authors will achieve their goal by analysing typical shots, lighting and referencing examples of films.