Hey all:
Keeping this updated is hard when you've got a busy schedule! Throughout the semester so far, I have been throwing around ideas for a research topic involving visual rhetoric. While many seem to be going to the route of advertising and things in the general public media, I wanted to bring something closer to my major--theatre. With this in mind, I have decided to go after the analysis of cinematography in movies and how the director uses camera technique to tell the story that he or she wanted to tell.
One of my favorite films, Children of Men, inspired this project with it's incredible use of handheld camera technique to give the action in the film a documentary, "you're-right-there-with-them" kind of feel. As such, many of my first sources have to do with the camera techniques used in the film, with short video clips being available on Youtube.
My most recent source, however, is more timely: it is a discussion of the technical use of cameras and lighting in the very recent hit Black Swan, a film nominated for multiple Oscars and has been receiving buzz about it's visuals, stars, and performances for weeks now.
That article can be found here: http://www.p3update.com/production/lighting/1061-lighting-the-darkness-of-black-swan-
Overall, the project is very interesting to me, and I'm hoping that I'll be able to make a paper and presentation that is compelling in the way that cinematography is so compelling to me.
