Museum Visit

The National Portrait Gallery features some of the most famous pieces of artwork ever made, which is why I decided to explore this museum to see if it would inspire me to improve my cinematography skills. I am currently in production for the first Assignment for Digital Film Production as part of my BA in Film Production. For this we have to make a human interest drama that can't be based around internal disabilities or issues. Everyone in my production group have noticed the homelessness issue more since we have moved to London, and we were interested as to what lead these people to become homeless and what stories they had to tell. Now the reason I am linking these to things together is because aspects of the paintings by Rembrandt and Turner could attributed effectively to shots within our final production.

This first picture by Rembrandt is a self portrait at the age of 63 and was painted in 1669, the thing that stands out most to me about this picture is the lighting. The way that there is a slight vignette around the subjects head shifts our focus to his face is very effective. I also noticed that there was more detail applied to the face than the rest of the image as it begins to fade away as you reach his hands. If this was a photograph this would be done with depth of field which is relatively easy to achieve, but doing this with a paint and a brush is somewhat more outstanding. If this were a shot in a film I can imagine holding this shot for a long period of time and slowly tacking in closer to the subjects face. This would create more meaning to the character and establish more about them, as if there is a deeper meaning, that will be revealed by seeing what expression the subject has.

The next picture is by William Turner and is entitled "Rain Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway" which was made in 1844. As soon as I saw this I instantly tried to imagine what that painting would look like if it was done in the present day. For example it could be a tube train going over London one sunny morning. By doing this I could see this being an establishing shot in our production. It has been painted in a very loose way which means that you can see the brush strokes as smog or wind and the golden colours make the presentation of the Great Western railway as glorious which could well have been the view at the time as it was a recent piece of modern technology. This would contrast with the picture in a modern setting as we are totally used to seeing trains as part of out daily life. It could be used as an interesting graphic match to show the passing of time like the bone and the space ship at the begging of Stanley Kubrick's "2001 Space Odyssey". 

From doing this I have explored how I can get different influences for my cinematography skills, rather than just taking elements from preexisting films and television. This is benifical as older mediums of expression generally contain stronger examples of composition and framing that can teach me good practice when constructing a shot. It has told me that you can be just as expressive with film as you can with paintings.