David Fincher, Michel Gondry, and Spike Jonze are just three of the many popular directors of the motion picture industry to have first started off with directing music videos. How has their experience with music videos influence their cinematography? Through the cinematographic analysis of some of their famous works, which includes the camera movement and angles, aesthetics, and more, it has been made clear how their past knowledge of music videos has made it’s effect into the way they direct their films.
To begin with, David Fincher’s career in filmmaking was set into motion through commercials, until he discovered music videos. His work in those areas were “often cited as a criticism,” although because of his experience in those shorter…show more content… He tends to use a mixture of dark lighting with color grading. The colors are also specific to the theme of the film or the symbolism Fincher is trying to portray. For instance, since Fight Club obviously incorporates fighting, the colors are black and blue to represent bruises. In The Social Network, the main color theme seen is orange, which makes sense since orange is a color that symbolizes adventure and social communication. Then, there are the camera movements presented in Fincher’s Fight Club, which were “ultra-fast or seemingly impossible” (King, 162). He is one who would much rather use tripods to film a shot, but when he does go hand-held there are usually symbolic purposes as to why. For instance, in the ending of Se7en when Mills and Somerset find John Doe, the two detectives’ camera work is shaky, but when the shot is on Doe it is on a tripod, which indicates that he holds the power. He also does not give the camera a personality, but instead presents the audience with what is happening or going to happen, making the camera omniscient. He also, as much as possible, does not move the camera. David Fincher’s use of framing connects to the characters in his films. When directing, he does not shoot unnecessary close-ups, unless he really needs it due to the fact that those types of shots allows the audience to pay close attention to that part. Therefore, he only uses it for a few moments, and with that,…show more content… He later continued on to direct more videos for many other musical artists, and like Fincher and Gondry, he did some work on television commercials. Afterwards, he got his big break in directing Being John Malkovich in 1999. From starting off with creating short videos he moved on to direct big feature films, bringing along with him his experiences and style of
