Film Analysis
Deconstructing Cinema, Frame by Frame
Read EssaysPublished work
How Kassovitz and Pierre Aïm turned a $500k budget into one of the most visually argued films of the 20th century.
Read Essay →Isolation in Blade Runner 2049, and why the most gorgeous frames Roger Deakins ever shot are the ones that hurt.
Read Essay →In Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri, a rōnin asks a great house for a place to die, and the request becomes an audit of everything the house says about itself.
Read Essay →On Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun: a holiday in Turkey, a camcorder tape, and the father Sophie spends twenty years trying to understand.
Read Essay →How Hoyte van Hoytema shot Interstellar on IMAX and 35mm, with space projected outside the cockpit windows and a black hole rendered to match real lenses.
Read Essay →Into and Across the Spider-Verse: how Sony Pictures Imageworks rebuilt computer animation around the look of a printed comic, then split it into six worlds.
Read Essay →Kubrick’s 2001 on 65mm: a desert projected onto a stage, models lit by a single sun, and a Star Gate exposed with the shutter open.
Read Essay →How John Seale shot Fury Road: cameras tethered in the War Rig’s cab, a crane on a racing truck, every subject held in the centre, and night shot in full sun.
Read Essay →How Linus Sandgren shot La La Land on 35mm at the old CinemaScope ratio of 2.55:1, in long takes under real twilight skies.
Read Essay →How Claudio Miranda shot Top Gun: Maverick from inside real Super Hornets, with six Sony Venice cameras in each cockpit and the sun as the only light.
Read Essay →How John Alcott and Kubrick shot the eighteenth century by its own light: candles alone on a lens made for NASA, and slow zooms that pull back until a scene becomes a painting.
Read Essay →How Bill Pope tinted the Matrix green and the real world a cold blue, lit sets bright enough for 300 frames a second, and helped turn 120 still cameras into one moving shot.
Read Essay →