Movie Magic! (Genshu)

Situation

Our mission was to watch 4 movies and describe the favorite two scenes with colors. We had to express “How does the filmmaker use color in the film?” I found it very interesting when teachers gave us this projects because I never experienced such a project in Japan. Then, we watched four movies, each just five minutes, “Stranger than Fiction”, “Kill Bill”, “Moulin Rouge” and “Everything is Illuminated”. First, we watched “Stranger than Fiction”, I felt it was interesting, but at the same time I thought it was difficult to express this movie with colors. This is because this movie did not have peculiar scenes, and everything was going on plainly. Next, we watched “Kill Bill”. Though I have not watched this movie, I have known it, because a famous Japanese actress appeared and it was very popular in Japan. There were many violent scenes and hard colors like red, yellow, black were used in this movie. Third, “Moulin Rouge”: in this movie, such fantastic colors as blue and purple were used, and the entire of scene was a little dark. The last movie was “Everything is Illuminated”. I did not know why, but I liked this movie just in five minutes. Here, light colors were mainly used.

Problem

After that we chose two movies among the four. I chose “Kill Bill” and “Everything is Illuminated”. About “Kill Bill”, I was impressed by the scene where a Chinese woman who was wearing all white colored cloths, a Japanese girl who was wearing a Japanese school costume and other who were wearing black colored suits walked through a restaurant. These people were centered in the scene and the left side of the scene was a clear white colored door, and the right side was a bright red colored wall. I thought the red and white colors expressed a kind of symmetry and were very beautiful. These colors were never mixed, and each colors expressed oneself. I felt these two colors described two people who were going to fight right now, and that the fight was going to be very fierce. About “Everything is Illuminated”, I liked this scene where a car stopped by a tree on the road. It was the scene before a guy found a large and beautiful sunflower fields. The color of sky was pale blue and white, that of the field is pale green and brown, and that of a car was clear blue. Pale and light color were used in this entire scene used something like gradation in the sky, field and road. These colors impressed on me melancholy and sadness. I thought the filmmaker tried to emphasize the next sunflower scene, by using pale colors in this scene.

Solution

In the mosaic of “Kill Bill”, I put red and white colors on each side in order to describe symmetry, and put white and black people in the center of the mosaic in order to express them.

In the mosaic of “Everything is Illuminated”, I used these four colors: turquoise, pale blue, pale yellow and white, and expressed plain sky. In the field, I used pale green and green for grass, and brown and beige. I tried to use gradation in entire mosaic to suit the scene.

Evaluation

I had many troubles in this projects because I had to express what happened in the moment, with only colors - I could not use movement and sounds different from movies. And especially, it was hard to cut papers to shape of people because it needed exactness and endurance. I thought there were big differences between just watching colors in movies and using colors actually in mosaics. However, I found that colors changed the characters depending on how they were used. For example, red, orange and yellow often express warm and love, but sometimes they express the danger and war. Also by contrasting different and symmetrical colors, we can emphasize the characters. Finally, we can emphasize a scene by putting light-pale-colored scene before.