Saturday, March 8, 2014

Ellen Kuras, ASC in the NY Times...

She is the cinematographer that mentioned in class last week. The film that I mentioned with the sepia and blue opening is Personal Velocity, directed by Rebecca Miller.


See Ellen's imdb here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0295238/?ref_=nm_flmg_cin_19

Read the entire NY Times article, "The Mind's Eye Made Real" 

Here is an excerpt:

Film is highly collaborative undertaking, so it is difficult to attribute the highest importance to any one aspect. As a cinematographer, though, I appreciate how involved and how influential we can be in the creative part of making a film.
A cinematographer is often the one who most closely glimpses a film’s layers of meaning as envisioned in the mind’s eye of the director. It is our challenge to convey these many layers of meaning through the visual, affecting the way a film works emotionally. Each story is different, hence every film has its own created, unique vision, its own look.
How the camera moves, the position and style of lighting, the color palette, even the blocking of actors, establishes the inner meaning of a film.
In collaborating with the director, I try to understand what he or she wants to say with the film -- what is the essence of the film? I create the look of a film according to this subtext because it is not verbally stated. How the camera moves, the position and style of lighting, how the color palette of a film is designed and even the blocking of actors in each scene, establishes the context and world of a film. These elements act as metaphors, but become actual elements of the story...