Spotlight on Wes Anderson

Going on with my previous post on colour lighting I found it would be silly of me not to explore the work of Wes Anderson himself.

Each of his films use an unbelievable about of colour, but each of the colours presented in the shots are there for a reason. They are there to express emotion through detail. Now I could do about 50 blog posts on the colour palette Anderson has used throughout his films but my investigation is directly on lighting itself.

Each of the shots below are from the film “The Grand Budapest Hotel”

grande-hotel-budapesteWhat I love about this shot is that it is clearly lit up just by a white artificial fill light, but the pink and blue objects surrounding the two characters has allowed the light to bounce of them and create a pink tinge on the faces.

 

A soft diffuser was also used in this shot giving it a soft feature.

This sGrand_Budapest_Hotel_Gustave_2hot is of M. Gustave in prison. The blue light positioned behind his character, the bluely grey features on the wall and on the prison uniform creates a sense of cold, bitter and distort representation.

 

A hard backlight as well as a fill light was also used in this shot.
The hard light is to create an edge around M. Gustave and the fill light is to see the background setting.

The shots below are from some of Wes Anderson’s other films, that use lighting.

wes-anderson-15

Hotel Chevalier.

Yellow in terms of colour is considered a happy colour and very positive yet her body language and emotions indicate the opposite. If you look into more detail she has a small window behind her head with natural lighting depicting daylight, yet she has two lamps on in her room, which is also there to create shadow.

LR-Moonrise-Kingdom-01

Moonrise Kingdom.

This shot from the film is depicting natural lighting as it is set and presented outside.

Usually a diffuser and a reflector was used to soften the light on the characters/objects faces.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Skip to toolbar