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Film Crit Hulk Smash: HULK VS. TOM HOOPER AND ART OF CINEMATIC AFFECTATION

This is a really excellent article on the use of cinematography and how it is used in film to affect audience perception and create specific emotion - I’m a big (if very amateur and self-taught) fan of good cinematography myself. But actually I found it is also quite useful and interesting to read and think about in terms of how we present scenes in fiction, how we use words and characters as viewpoints for the reader and how this affects how they read our work.

I was having a conversation with Spicedpiano about this today, about how I tend to think of the POV character as a film camera and how this affects the reader and how I tell the story, and this article really ties in with that. The analogy would be something like this - when I want to convey emotion, I go for a close-up shot that tells us a lot about how they’re feeling because we’re right inside their head. When I don’t want us to know what they’re thinking, I would go for a shot taken from further away, the camera looking in on them from outside. And when I want half-and-half the camera is on their shoulder instead of in their head, so I am seeing what they see without being so intimate with the character.

For me this way of thinking about it helps me understand how to present the details and the story, and the way I use the viewpoint (the camera) to show those makes a huge difference to how they’re interpreted. I figured other people might be interested in having a read.

FYI, the article is in all caps (Film Critic Hulk does his reviews as if he were the Hulk) which makes it a bit hard to read, but really do persevere - it’s totally worth it.