Question for you?

In the Road home, why do you think the film director Zhang Yimou chose to have the present day in black and white, and the past shown in color? If you were the director would you have chosen to do it this way, if not how would you have done it?

Response to The 400 Blows

While watching the movie The 400 Blows I couldn't stop thinking about how much repetition went on throughout the film, and then I thought to myself is there any significance to this repetition? In one scene during this movie the Director chose to have the camera angle high in the air casting down onto the scene. In this scene you see the care free, oblivious gym teacher running down the streets of paris with his students following him. You then start to see the students one by one leaving the gym teacher until there is only a couple of students following him. With the director using this camera angle, the viewer gets the sense of funny, joking teenage boys enjoying a prank. Then at the end of the movie, the director chooses to film the main character Antoine running away from gym class again although this time it is much more serious because he is running for his life. The director proceeded to capture this scene with an eye level shot which allows the viewer to capture the seriousness in this scene. I think it is very interesting on how the director repeated a scene in the movie and just by the changing the camera angles he was able to capture two completely different emotions, reactions and scenes for the viewers.

Camera shot or angle?

This is classified as a close-up shot. This type of shot is typically captured from the shoulders of a character and up. The intent for this type of camera shot is to capture the emotion being portrayed from the character to the viewer, so that the audience can connect with the character. This example provided is a close-up from the movie The 400 Blows. As you can see this character Antoine Doinel just realized that he was in trouble for lying about his mother dying to his teacher, and this close-up shot captured his emotion for the viewer to see.

Hey, I'm Megan McCarthy a senior Nursing major! I'm looking forward to learning more about film and all the aspects of film that I am not aware of.