King Kong

During the process of envisioning and designing a film, the director, production designer, and art director (in collaboration with the cinematographer) are concerned with several major spatial and temporal elements. These design elements punctuate and underscore the movement of figures within the frame, including the following: setting, lighting, costuming, makeup, and hairstyles. To this end I have chosen to analyze a scene from the movie Training Day starring Denzel Washington as Detective Alonzo Harris and in this scene he is displaying his displeasure with the fact that the gang bangers in the neighborhood he works as a narcotics detective don't have his back over the white rookie detective he is training.

The Director - Antoine Fuqua's vision was to bring the heat and intensity of Training Day to the big screen and strove to bring the audience not only into what officers in the rough neighborhoods of Los Angeles experience on the outside, not only from chases and shootouts to life or death moments, but on the inside as they grapple with an amoral world of drug dealers, murderers, rapists and thieves. Fuqua wanted to create a gritty, unflinching, fast moving intro to life on the other side of the legal line. With this film he was able to capture the mean streets of Los Angeles in an honest and revealing way, but also with a visual style that makes every scene exciting, whether it's a major action sequence or just two guys in a car talking.

Production Designer - Naomi Shohan wanted the movie's design to reflect the underlying relevance of the story because they filmed in all real locations. All the interiors done on stage were taken from the locations and researched in the neighborhoods with the help of the residents which also gave the film the authenticity of being in the "hood". She became sort of an urban anthropologist, because everything the viewer sees is as it really is. The colors and textures used, change throughout the scene, but everything they used was taken directly from the neighborhood that you find yourself in throughout the clip.

Art Director - David Lazan and Cinematographer - Mauro Fiore shot the film almost entirely in sequence, following the clock from the crack of dawn to a very dark night of reckoning. Compressing intense action and emotion into a brief time frame became one of their key challenges. They had to make sure the film felts like it was one single day unfolding which became the single biggest challenge during the production. It was their job to keep the light consistent, the emotional tone consistent, and the momentum going through the curve of that one day, which meant they wound up plotting out the movement of the sun and its angles to obtain the best shots. They had to make sure that the ticking clock represented a dramatic element in the movie, so that the viewer would perceive that as night falls you're going deeper and deeper into the war zone.