Film stills

Unsure of what my next piece of work will be I’ve decided to go back to what I started my ideas before and watch some films to create film stills. to have more of a focus to my work I will be watching only black and white horrors. I’m going to start by just taking stills from the films that I find interesting and then i will see what the key themes are.

The Thing from Another World– 1951

The crew of a remote Arctic base fights off a murderous monster from outer space after finding a space craft in the snow. The film starts of slow where I took the first two stills. Ominous plain landscapes with small figures. With no context to the film the images don’t say horror however they are confusing and somewhat troubling. The second half of the images are from when the action starts I stuck with the idea of images that don’t hold memorable imagery. You wont know the film from the stills straight away. The lighting in the last two images are very purposeful adding dramatic effect to the images, something I want to consider in the future of my work.

King Kong – 1933

King Kong is one of the more well known black and white films. Still wanting to stick to the idea of the films not being instantly recognisable. The images I find the most aesthetic have tended to be of woman often in distress or landscapes with small figures in the back. These images aren’t necessary horror but still have a spooky essence to them. the images of women remind me of my own work. For me its the sense of relatability in seeing the fear in the women and being afraid of that fear that i can see in their faces.

Something that came up in my last work in critic is that the narrative in the images wasn’t clear. we didn’t have an ideas of who the female character was or who she was afraid off. Having a key character, who is the woman and why is she in distress?  Who is causing her the distress? What is the  nature of her distress?

Night of the living dead-1968

The most violent of the films I’ve looked at so far. With more than one female character there was multiple opportunity for scenes of terror and blood.  with much more action there were less of the eerie landscape like images and much more gore.  Some of these images are reminiscent to the photographs I took before. with some of them looking very much like Cindy Sherman’s film stills.  I’m still unclear in what I will do with these images. Recreating them is one option. But this will have to include set design with multiple images throughout multiple films that’s lots of sets to consider, will I have time to create all these sets with the accuracy I would want.