I haven’t spent too much time this semester talking about influences. I examined fantasia, and why it had such an impact on me as a child, however, I haven’t considered the auteurs who have influenced me as an adult and film-maker.

At the risk of sounding outrageously boring, I really have to talk about two filmmakers in particular, Christopher Nolan and Stanley Kubrick. Now, I know that these are far from the most inspired choices for any aspiring film-maker. They’re safe, recognisably good, and popular on the internet.

However, Nolan approaches films in a mathematical, puzzle like fashion. He sees them as things to be solved, investigations into form and function. The Prestige, for example, functioned as a magic trick unto itself. (The book was better). No popular film-maker working today understands the potential of film as both puzzle-box and illusion generator. After I had started to investigate the stairs, I realised I had seen them attempted before.

Firstly, this is the kind of shot and feeling that I hoped to create for myself in the stairwell. In hindsight, I really had no chance at all.

Inception is a fascinating film, not only for the metatextual ways in which it deals with narrative and story, but also for the manner in which it recreates the non-linear and unsteady nature of dreams. This distortion and twisting has obviously been percolating in the back of my mind for some time. I love the nature of film and the ways in which a film-maker can manipulate space and time in such a way that total fabrications feel completely plausible for the audience. Why recreate reality, when film is fundamentally unreal? Like most human ideas, it can be anything.

Interestingly, inception deals with the nature of ideas too and how they are planted, grow and change. Perhaps it planted this idea in my head in its own way.

However, it’s not just Nolan that has subliminaly influenced my work this semester. I was doing some research on mathematical framing, as I’m fascinated by it, and I realised that Stanley Kubrick did this all the time. He had a grounding in photography, and loved to construct elaborate, geometrically precise shots.

The video is a little fast and tacky, but you get a sense for his framing and the means in which he had patterns and mathematics that he hung films off again and again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW2HJSOeAkw

This second film breaks down the frame a little more, and this approach extended through all his work. Obviously, I can’t do a lengthy comparative breakdown of all his work in this blog, but it serves as a reminder of how important maths is when you construct a film. Angles, focal length, exposure, framing, composition, movement. Everything in the frame has a basis in science and maths, and to ignore these vital components is something that I feel to be folly. I mean, you find the best work when you marry art and analysis. You need to know your tools, so why ignore the physics of the frame?