Visual Art Crossover: Morning at the Museum

Northern Ireland Supermom Pilot Course, Week 3

This week, in addition to continued scriptwriting, we’ve been focusing on the purely visual aspects of filmmaking. The visual style of a film has its own language, so it’s important to look at each scene individually and build up to create the overall style of the film. To help the trainees learn about this topic concretely, we took a trip to the Ulster Museum to study a variety of styles of paintings. After a short lesson about using composition, framing and colour to create an evocative scene, each trainee completed a study of a painting. The exercise asked them first to describe the painting and their impression of it, then to dissect the various elements that would help the artist convey those feelings. For example, for this painting (Chronicle of Orange, Elizabeth Magill, 2007*)…

…the trainee wrote that “the painting seems at first glance peaceful, natural; but on closer look you notice lines of clashing, struggling colour. Pool of green, orange sunset, clash of branches on peaceful backdrop.” She described it as simultaneously “peaceful, chaotic, and evocative”. The composition is heaviest in the left foreground, with a pale, washed-out background, which helps to convey a slight imbalance to an otherwise peaceful scene. Overall it is “non-symmetrical, yet centred by the setting sun and hanging branch. It follows the rule of thirds” loosely to divide the composition horizontally.

The last part of the exercise was to write a one-line story inspired by the painting. For Chronicle of Orange, the trainee wrote: “Nature rebels against man’s ordered intrusion into her realm with chaotic growth”. Another trainee, who had studied an 18th-century portrait of a man (Life-Sized Heads, Thomas Frye, 1761-1762), was even inspired to write a one-sentence prose poem that conveyed the symmetrical directness of the portrait:

"Aloysius Samuel Taylor, seer and soothsayer, did fix his unwavering eyes upon mine, and clasping the Book of Destiny in his fine fingers, did hold mine gaze thus with such a look of eternal unsentimental pity that I believed myself in the presence of the Buddha of Compassion, and faltering in both heart and soul, my body sank to the very floor.”

These types of creative exercises help the trainees learn about visual techniques and foster their ideas about how to apply these techniques to their short film. The visual elements will work with the script to succinctly convey the emotions and messages of the film to the audience—as long as we get the visual language right!

For more about the Supermom Transfer of Innovation Project, please see http://www.supermom-kick-off.eu/

* Image courtesy of the Wilkinson Gallery, http://www.re-title.com/exhibitions/archive_WilkinsonGallery1718.asp