With the development and change of technology, more and more scientific and technological elements and means have replaced the traditional shooting techniques and been widely used in modern film and television works. Especially for science fiction, action, and suspense movies, the use of so-called special effects instead of living action has become a common operation in the current film shooting process. However, the emergence of special effects and CG animation technology has to a large extent lowered the requirements for actors’ skills and directors’ shooting techniques. Although the effects are gradually approaching reality, it is difficult for audiences to fully feel the authenticity in the technically synthesized shots with the current technology. This will have a great negative impact on the audience’s viewing experience. In this respect, Nolan is a genius. His shooting technique is brilliant. The suspense of the plot is only secondary, but after watching it, I will want to explore some possibilities with others, and I will also want to take away other people’s things so that he can examine the value of things again. In this analysis process, I will take some shots in Nolan’s representative works Inception and The Joker as examples to analyze Nolan’s shot application skills and live-action shooting techniques in the film.

 

As for Inception, like a series of Nolan’s previous works, their starting point is still the realism of photography. According to the lines in the film, when we dream, we feel that our dreams are real, so this is very important to the photography and every aspect of the film. In the film, the director didn’t want the dream passages to feel unrealistic and surreal, but to make them as solid as the real world. So the core shooting method of the film is to take the real way to make the dream look like real life (Chang. 2010, p. 19). In most cases, the surreal feeling in the film comes from the environment, not the cinematography. By maintaining a sense of realism, the director believes that he can create a subtle sense of strangeness or uneasiness when needed, without taking the audience out of the story. As a result, the film works, explosion for restaurant magnificent scene, the scene director decided to use deformation 35 mm as the main film format, because this is, after all, one of the most useful, the camera is very light, the efficiency is very high, at the same time, there is a lot of mature experience, in some big scene and formalize the scene to shoot from significantly negative (Fisher. 2011, p. 42). At the same time, in terms of scenes, the director adopts the way of the real model and miniature model to present the realism of the explosion and the shot effects from different distances and angles in the most realistic way, which is impossible to achieve by relying on CG animation.

 

In addition, the classic corridor weightlessness fighting scene in the film is used for the shooting of a zero-gravity field surface. The director duplicates two identical corridor scenes to achieve the same overall effect when viewed from the camera on both interiors. For the first time, the entire corridor could be rotated 360 degrees vertically, with the camera facing the bottom of the corridor, moving undisturbed or mounted on a specially designed track system that allowed the gyroscope-mounted camera to move back and forth in a hidden groove (Mohd. 2020, p. 32). The second time, the hallway was able to stand upright and the camera was mounted on a retractable platform, looking straight up. The actors performed in the air by hanging the corridor. A third method of shooting in a corridor is to put the actors on a cart, which is removed from the scene at a later stage. Corridor paragraph requires special action rhythm, in this scenario, the actors need to focus all energy of action to a flight reservation, so that it can use this good equipment and techniques to real presents interesting mix, surreal, bizarre, but with the rhythm of movement of striking, the actor’s skill and performance is also a great test.

 

Many people will think that Nolan’s works are too inclined to the construction of scenes and lack enough connotation and emotional shooting skills. Compared with Inception, The Joker presents not only real fighting scenes but also enough depictions of the characters’ emotions (Cutting & Armstrong. 2018, p. 1320). The film also takes Nolan’s specialty of live-action shooting to enhance its authenticity. Film of this scene, Arthur is keeping a diary in the room at this time, the surface of the room is warm light the proportion of diablo large project lighting limited tightly surrounded, Arthur right-hand record partial normalization of life, but he will record some extreme idea with his left hand in a twinkling of an eye, actually has been slow to spy on his clown personality and to intervene, Therefore, although the scene in the kitchen on the left is far away from him, the lack of cold colors and blue light representing the personality of the clown is particularly striking. This represents that the personality of the clown has gradually sprouted, especially the position of the window in the middle of the camera is blue. Maybe the clown has not only sprouted but also invaded and occupied half of Arthur’s thoughts. The use of blue and yellow well conveys the inner emotions of the characters to the audience and brings the audience into it.

 

In conclusion, through the above analysis, it can be found that the sense of reality In the shooting and process of a film is very important to the audience’s viewing effect. Generally speaking, when it comes to creating a movie scene, the effect of sufficient shooting techniques and scene construction is much better than the effect of CG animation design. For Nolan’s filming techniques and scene, can through the adoption of appropriate machines and scenes arrangement as far as possible in the cinematic scenes materialization, at the same time, in the process of rendering of scene and emotion, Nolan flexibility combined with specific lighting effects to realize to the audience emotional leading roles of actors and mental state changes.

 

References

  1. Fisher, M 2011, ‘The Lost Unconscious: Delusions and Dreams in Inception’, Film quarterly, vol. 64, no. 3, pp. 37–45.
  2. Mohd Syahmir Alias 2020, ‘Kajian Keselarian antara Filem Inception dengan Pemikiran Al-Ghazali (A Parallel Study of Inception and Al-Ghazali’s Thought)’, Akademika (Kuala Lumpur), vol. 90, no. 3, pp. 31-60.
  3. Cutting, JE & Armstrong, KL 2018, ‘Cryptic Emotions and the Emergence of a Metatheory of Mind in Popular Filmmaking’, Cognitive science, vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 1317–1344.
  4. Chang, J 2010, ‘Nolan’s dream come true’, Variety, vol. 419, no. 8, p. 19.