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Tag Archive for Kimberly Unger

A Space Opera, a Mystery and an Intrigue Walk Into a Bar

February 5, 2016 future, Writing Comments Off on A Space Opera, a Mystery and an Intrigue Walk Into a Bar
Promotional Image from The Expanse on SyFy

Promotional Image from The Expanse on SyFy

 

It was more subtle than I expected, for some reason.  In the Expanse we are following, essentially, three different types of stories with three different visual directions.

The first is Noir Detective tale about a cop, hard-boiled right down to the hat.  Gritty, morally questionable, bloodied knuckles and twitchy informants, you could separate this tale out and have a tidy, stand along show all it’s own.  Yes, it’s set on a space-station, but you could take this story and plug it into the back-alley’s of any major port city in the world, it would be just as tight as well-handled.

The second is is pure Space Opera.  Borderline dysfunctional crew on an away-mission watches in horror as their ship is blown to smithereens.  As they work together, first towards safety and survival, next towards identifying the target of their revenge, they start to form a cohesive, if wary team.

Third is an absolutely gorgeous Palace Intrigue tale.  Lush environments, vaulted ceilings, wardrobes and fabrics to die for.  No fists, no guns, only words, sharp, lethal, beguiling and clever.  Careers and lives are ended without our characters lifting so much as a finger.

Each story follows its own thread, with the environments and directing styles built to match.  The interior of the Ceres is befitting a noir tale, dark, dimly lit with sharp shadows and more than your usual share of detritus in the corners and alleyways.  In contrast, the crew of the Canterbury goes from the interiors of the Cant to the Scopuli to the Rosinante, always well kept and orderly.  Even the old workhorse of the Canterbury was tidy, even in its moments of disrepair.  The intrigues on Earth take place in similarly appropriate surroundings.

All three stories are following the same mystery from different angles, giving us, the viewer, a complete picture.  A roundabout, if you will, where we can see the same event from every angle and every lens.

The interesting stuff is going to happen (for those of us with a yen for the visual design and thought processes) as these stories collide.  We had our first taste of it here at the end of Season One, where we see our Noir Detective meet up with the Plucky Space Crew.  It’s almost a shock to see those different presumptions, those different visual canons come together.  The same room with the Plucky Space Crew getting shot at takes on an ENTIRELY different light once our Detective shows up, our Detective looks out of place, a Noir character dropped into a blaster-fight in a brightly lit space. Once they ascend the stairs, we have a shift again, we move all the characters over into the Noir where our Detective looks entirely in his own element as they find the room where the person they have been searching for is holed up.

The visual language is just going to get more complex, and I am hugely interested to see if they continue this trend of casting the environments into a different light depending on which character is the lead in any given bit of the story.  I’m hoping they don’t end up with a homogenized look at the end of the day, but seeing it here, in the first season, suggests that the visual designers and directors are telling us this story on many levels, not just with the words and actions of the actors.

 

The Art of the Eye in Limitless

November 17, 2015 Writing Comments Off on The Art of the Eye in Limitless

Title image for LIMITLESS, the TV Show.

Is anybody else geeking out about the visual direction in Limitless?

I mean, every show every movie has its own visual storytelling techniques. Ways and methods of manipulating viewer emotions, foreshadowing, context-setting etc. It’s a known part of the art of visual storytelling, and every production team has their own distinct style.

Of the shows that are currently on the air, however, Limitless has the clearest vocabulary. You can turn the sound off and read the show like you might read the pages of a comic book. You don’t need the words, the changes in luminosity, contrast, color saturation all of these serve the story at all times, and they tell the story so clearly sometimes that the actors don’t need to say a word.

You’ve noticed, I presume, that when our main character, Brian, takes the drug that allows him to be smarter than everybody else (NZT), The entire world gets slightly more saturated. In the occasional shot where they overdo it, Brian looks like a bit like he’s glowing.

They counter this with the rare occasions where Brian is not taking NZT. Everything looks like you would expect human saturation wise, but Brian has a penchant for oversize, ugly, comfortable sweaters and the occasional hoodie thrown in for good measure. Because the “every-man” always wears a hoodie these days.

On the super-negative side (also rare), rather than making the scene go gray, or dimming the lights, when Brian is having a bad emotional reaction, whether it be to his actions on the show or whether it be to negative side effects of NZT, they hype the contrast. Everything in the scene develops a hard edge because the difference between the darks and the lights has been heightened to an almost uncomfortable degree.  Couple this with some handheld camera work and you have scenes that are visually painful to watch.

Usually this type of lighting language is handled in a much more obvious fashion. Characters having a bad day, they have him sitting in the dark. If your characters having a good day, the sky is blue and there’s not a cloud to be seen. This is the first time I have seen them overtly manipulating things like saturation and contrast in the service of a small-screen story. Adjusting contrast, saturation or hue after-the-fact is a garden-variety post processing effect. Almost every show or movie out there does to some degree, but most of the time it’s done to correct issues that could not be worked around any other way, like having to film on a cloudy day or tweaking the lighting so that a scene shot in the sunset looks like it’s been shot at sunrise.

It’s delightful to see this kind of aggressive visual direction showing up on the small screen. It goes along way towards adding polish and sophistication to an already excellent cast and script.

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