Please refer to the last post if you have any questions about Rule of Thirds/Golden Ratio, why it works biologically, and how it appears. Includes (finally) overlays of the grids and the golden spiral against the screenshots I’d referred to in previous posts.
Now that we’ve got that covered, lets go to Mad Max and that one scene where Valkyrie was acting as bait. Nakedly.
First of all, of everything in this shot, Valkyrie moves the least. The mirrors are constantly moving, the War Rig is constantly moving, and she only does one movement from sitting upright to curled up. The eye is drawn towards movement and flashy things, it will naturally be more drawn to mirrors and War Rig just because of the way our vision assigns importance.
But if we overlay the Thirds and the Golden guildelines onto this composition it becomes even more interesting.
Rule of Thirds lines are black, Golden Ratio lines are blue, the dotted grey are the boundary thirds (upper third, lower third, etc, for more information on these go here).
What’s highlighted? The War Rig, the mirrors, and Valkyrie’s head. Her naked body is in a neutral zone that’s not a compositional sweet spot (ie. anywhere the lines cross). In fact the only thing that lands squarely on a sweet spot is the diagonal of the structure, which points your eye at the War Rig. The Center Framing tendencies of Mad Max also would make the apex of the structure the focus, and pointing at the War Rig instead of back at Valkyrie’s body.
There are so many different ways to stage this that there is no way this composition is an accident. There are so many different ways to objectify her even accidentally.
Let me give you an example you one of the worst possible versions of it: Instead of the War Rig and the Valkyrie being introduced in the sequence as a single shot, have the same information in three shots: a wide shot of the War Rig from the back, pulling up instead of coming in sideways (with the Valkyrie’s structure shot “over the shoulder” to establish distance), a tighter shot of Valkyrie, then a shot back to the War Rig from the front pulling up with a reaction shot from the people inside.
This might be what the tighter (ie. closer zoom’d) shot of Valkyrie looks like:
Here, bust and knee are at the sweet spots, the dominant diagonals (simply google “diagonal composition” or “diagonals in composition”) lead back to her, the diagonals of her thighs draw the eye back to the crotch, and the closeness makes it almost impossible to negate the sheer amount of skin. Hell, if crotch isn’t allowed, they could just stick to a head and chest shot like they did with the lady in the AOU trailer (see the first post or near the end of the last post).
But Miller, bless him, didn’t shoot it this way.
I found maybe two shots in this entire sequence that’s kinda iffy on the focus on her body, but I’m fairly sure I have a sense of where they might be coming from logistically and will go into detail on the editing/storytelling concerns at that moment.
I took screenshots of almost every cut in this entire sequence (plus one each at the beginning and end of every zoom) and threw in some screenshots with guidelines in the subsequent eye-trace and composition discussion so, fair warning, it’s picture-heavy.
This entry was posted by jbc on Wednesday, June 17th, 2015 at 5:16 pm and is filed under Tumblr.
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