Friday, 12 December 2014

Fish Tank

Fish Tank is a social realist film, a film in which represents the minority and often uses specific cinematography techniques to create empathy toward the characters involved.
Social realist films try to emulate real life, so the cinematographer try to make the film come across as realistic as possible. One way in which this is achieved in multiple scenes is by the use of hand held cameras.


In this clip of Fisk Tank, whilst Mia is walking around her estate, no cuts are used, there is just one hand held shot following her around as she walks, in modern, mainstream cinema, there would be a multitude of different shots and camera angles used, but as this doesn't really portray real life, the cinematographer decided it would be best to use one hand held camera, so it's almost as if we are walking alongside Mia. 
At the beginning of the clip Mia is in a room just finishing off her dancing, the lighting in the room is completely natural, you will notice as the shot cuts to an over the shoulder of mia, we can see the outside is perfectly exposed, but mia is slightly under exposed. No artificial lighting was used to keep that element of reality within the scene, something the cinematographer would've thought about when shooting the scene.
As we all know, real life does not include a soundtrack, there is no non-diegetic music that plays to reflect what mood we are in or when a certain situation gets better or worse, so this means within Fish Tank there are no non-diegetic sounds used at all, as it would ruin the realistic feel to the film.


However there is some music used throughout the film, like in this scene, 4 of the characters are in a car, the camera man is inside the car with them with a hand held camera, to capture the bumps and turns of the car to make it more realistic. The male character, Connor, then puts a CD in the radio and the music begins to play. In mainstream cinema, you would hear the diegetic music for a moment and then it would eventually be played over the top as a non-diegetic soundtrack, however, because Fish Tank is a social realist film, we just hear the music in which we can see playing on screen.

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