“Terminal”: analysis of lighting schemes and techniques | Articles | Photo, video, optics

With no lan­guage, no cur­ren­cy, and no idea what to do next, the weirdo is stuck in the bor­der area of ​​an air­port. And that weirdo is Tom Han­ks! The actor is not the first time to play a lit­tle sil­ly, but empath­ic char­ac­ters, he has the well-known For­rest Gump behind him. In “Ter­mi­nal” the hero is of a dif­fer­ent order, but also a lit­tle clum­sy, fun­ny, stu­pid and kind. Spiel­berg’s “Ter­mi­nal” is not the direc­tor’s most reveal­ing work, but these “not the best” some­times hide rich visu­al images.

This is anoth­er text of a per­ma­nent sec­tion in which I ana­lyze films in terms of col­or and com­po­si­tion of shots. The pre­vi­ous one can be read here.

COLOR

Stills from the movie “Ter­mi­nal”, 2004. Direc­tor: Steven Spiel­berg

Spiel­berg is one of those who thinks and works on pic­tures at all lev­els. Includ­ing at the lev­el of emo­tion­al per­cep­tion of the view­er. The blue col­or is always used asso­cia­tive­ly to empha­size a cer­tain detach­ment, melan­choly, lone­li­ness. Roy Ander­s­son gen­er­al­ly builds almost all of his films and his typ­i­cal lone­ly char­ac­ters on cool shades.

But Spiel­berg goes fur­ther and hits the asso­cia­tive emo­tion jack­pot. He uses a melan­choly blue for a char­ac­ter as lone­ly as Navorsky. And most impor­tant­ly — at the air­port, a place where any per­son is a small Chekhov char­ac­ter sur­round­ed by a face­less crowd of strangers.

Stills from the movie “Ter­mi­nal”, 2004. Direc­tor: Steven Spiel­berg

Of course, where nec­es­sary, Spiel­berg com­ple­ments it, work­ing in the clas­sic com­bi­na­tion of blue and yel­low. Blue in these scenes bor­ders on shades of green, and yel­low is twist­ed to neon-acid.

Stills from the movie “Ter­mi­nal”, 2004. Direc­tor: Steven Spiel­berg

The pic­ture of the film also occa­sion­al­ly goes into green tones, and the direc­tor sup­ple­ments them with red ele­ments.

Frame from the film “Ter­mi­nal”, 2004. Direc­tor: Steven Spiel­berg

Anoth­er fleet­ing shot proves that the direc­tor was engaged in seri­ous elab­o­ra­tion of scenes and post-pro­duc­tion. The screen is still the same blue, but tak­en clos­er to the azure hue. This means that the clas­sic scheme of blue and red needs to be cor­rect­ed: the lat­ter is brought to a crim­son hue by col­or cor­rec­tion.

Stills from the movie “Ter­mi­nal”, 2004. Direc­tor: Steven Spiel­berg

It only takes a few freeze-frames to see how Spiel­berg thinks through the col­ors to the small­est detail. Here is the blue uni­form, shad­ing the yel­low tones in the scene, the red shirt of the pro­tag­o­nist in the blue tones of the air­port, red and blue again, and even the com­bi­na­tion of yel­low and blue only due to cloth­ing in one of the scenes.

Steven Spiel­berg is not the first to work with col­or, using the clothes of the char­ac­ters in the frame. But the use of such a tool empha­sizes the seri­ous­ness of this work: com­pe­tent col­or­ing is not just about plac­ing light sources with dif­fer­ent tem­per­a­tures.

Stills from the movie “Ter­mi­nal”, 2004. Direc­tor: Steven Spiel­berg

In sev­er­al scenes, you can see anoth­er sta­ble col­or scheme, one of the most clas­sic — RGB — red, green and blue. Look close­ly, even in the scene at the table there is red — bright flow­ers on the table.

STAFF

Stills from the movie “Ter­mi­nal”, 2004. Direc­tor: Steven Spiel­berg

One of the char­ac­ter­is­tic cam­era tech­niques in films is the effect of pres­ence. Focus is tak­en on a per­son in the mid­dle ground, and anoth­er is in the fore­ground. As a rule, he is only par­tial­ly in the frame, fac­ing the main char­ac­ter and out of focus. Such a sim­ple tech­nique allows the direc­tors to evoke a sense of belong­ing among the view­ers, as if they were unwit­ting par­tic­i­pants in this dia­logue on the screen. The recep­tion can be seen in Nolan in Incep­tion, Ander­son in The French Her­ald, and Spiel­berg him­self in Catch Me If You Can. “Ter­mi­nal” is no excep­tion — here the effect of pres­ence also appears spo­rad­i­cal­ly.

The Ter­mi­nal is not the biggest fish in Spiel­berg’s nets, but this film def­i­nite­ly has some­thing to note and take note of. Below are six inter­est­ing direc­tor’s tricks that you can safe­ly put on the mood­board of your film­ing.

Frame from the film “Ter­mi­nal”, 2004. Direc­tor: Steven Spiel­berg

1. Shoot­ing in a crowd.
This set­ting can even be seen in the work of Peter Lind­bergh. You can fol­low the style of the film and place your sub­ject in the cen­ter of the air­port hall. There are oth­er options — place the mod­el in the mid­dle of a pedes­tri­an cross­ing, sur­round­ed by peo­ple pass­ing by, or turn it to face the cam­era on an esca­la­tor against traf­fic. Any crowd­ed space will do.

This shot is great to shoot with a long expo­sure. So the sil­hou­ettes of pass­ing peo­ple will become com­plete­ly face­less, blur­ry. The empha­sis will remain on the motion­less hero.

Frame from the film “Ter­mi­nal”, 2004. Direc­tor: Steven Spiel­berg

Frame from the film “Ter­mi­nal”, 2004. Direc­tor: Steven Spiel­berg

2. Sil­hou­ette.
The light source is aimed at the back­ground in such a way that the hero in the fore­ground remains only a dark sil­hou­ette with­out details. This is back light. A sim­ple stu­dio scheme can be trans­ferred to any oth­er loca­tion.

Frame from the film “Ter­mi­nal”, 2004. Direc­tor: Steven Spiel­berg

3. Shoot­ing through glass.
This tech­nique has long been cho­sen by many pho­tog­ra­phers, and the frames from the “Ter­mi­nal” are just one more con­fir­ma­tion of the visu­al pow­er of such shoot­ing. Due to the reflec­tive prop­er­ties of the glass, almost a dou­ble expo­sure shot is obtained. In addi­tion, the glass in such cas­es works as a smooth­ing fil­ter.

Stills from the movie “Ter­mi­nal”, 2004. Direc­tor: Steven Spiel­berg

4. Side and direc­tion­al light.
In the movie, this tech­nique is used only in a cou­ple of scenes. Direct­ing light on the faces of the char­ac­ters, the direc­tor empha­sizes their emo­tions, focus­ing the atten­tion of the view­er. This tech­nique is easy to use in por­trait pho­tog­ra­phy. It is enough just to set the light source on the side of the sub­ject. To repeat the frame with the girl, you need a point light source, such as a pho­to torch. This tech­nique is used when it is nec­es­sary to high­light a spe­cif­ic detail in the frame or, as in this case, the face of the hero­ine.

Stills from the movie “Ter­mi­nal”, 2004. Direc­tor: Steven Spiel­berg

5. Loca­tion.
From scene to scene, Spiel­berg’s film rein­forces the air­port’s pow­er as an inter­est­ing loca­tion to shoot. Lots of neon signs, glass, met­al, reflec­tive sur­faces and bright lights. If shoot­ing at the air­port is prob­lem­at­ic for you, you can use any shop­ping cen­ter or bright­ly lit pub­lic place as a loca­tion. Due to the details in the frame, the loca­tion can be used for exper­i­ments with non-stan­dard light. A new set­ting for today’s pop­u­lar col­or shoots, not only in the evening.

Frame from the film “Ter­mi­nal”, 2004. Direc­tor: Steven Spiel­berg

Frame from the film “Ter­mi­nal”, 2004. Direc­tor: Steven Spiel­berg

6. Sophis­ti­cat­ed light. Select­ed frames can be copied direct­ly into the mood­board of future shoot­ing: why not a pic­ture in the spir­it of pop­u­lar pho­tog­ra­phers shoot­ing with bright light­ing? This is already a trend, so tech­ni­cal­ly there is noth­ing new in these frames from the Ter­mi­nal. How­ev­er, such find­ings are yet anoth­er reminder that ideas can be drawn from any­where. Even from films 20 years ago, when no one was talk­ing about mul­ti-col­ored shoot­ing.