Cinematography in The Truman Show

Discuss how cinematography is used to create meaning in one scene from The Truman Show

In the ending scene of The Truman Show, it begins with a medium shot of Truman facing away from the camera which is also a high angle shot as it is taken from slightly above him. This contributes to the feeling of watching him as it's not a natural angle and he's made to seem weaker as the viewer is above him. Then, there's a cut to a close up shot of Christof which is a low angle shot. As his face dominates the screen and the viewer is looking at him from below, this gives the impression of him having a lot of power. Due to it being a close up, it also allows the audience to focus on his emotions as it creates a lot of closeness to the character because of the lack of personal space.

There's then a wide shot showing Truman standing on the steps, however he is the only object in the shot and the rest of the frame is just the blank blue of the fake sky. The use of this shot despite there not being anything else interesting to show, helps display the emptiness of his life in terms of genuine events, connection and emotions. The shot is also not from a particular angle like the previous ones which were high and low angle. This puts him on more of a level platform and shows how he now has the choice about what he does. He's at a crossroads in terms of what he wants to do and the more neutral angle shows how he could swing either way.

After this, there's another high angle shot except this time it's two shots in one frame as Christof is shown caressing a screen displaying Truman. Again, this shows the power he has over Truman as well as the intimacy and closeness that he feels towards him, due to it being an extreme close up shot as well. By including the two shots, it's another reminder to the audience about how Truman is controlled and almost like a puppet to Christof, especially due to the size difference which is created through the juxtaposition of the extreme close shot of his hand with the medium shot of Truman which makes him look smaller and almost like a doll in comparison to the director. The shot gives a god-like look to Christof. As well, the two shots within the frame creates a sense of fakeness, continuing the theme which had been emerging throughout the film.

After a series of similar shots to the beginning of the scene, Lauren is shown with a medium shot which is more effective than a closer shot to her as the tv that she is watching is included in the frame creating a link, through the screen, between her and Truman. The camera is also positioned in line with the top of the tv, creating a high angle shot and showing how the tv, the programme, has power over her as well. A little while after this, there's a wide shot of the bar which helps to display the scale of people watching and invested in Truman's life as everyone in the room is captivated by the screen. Then there's a medium shot of the viewer in the bath, like in the shot of Lauren, showing the tv and remote as a connection to the show. There's then a closer shot of Lauren to show more of her emotion and trepidation.

The shot of Christof remains as a close up to show his emotions throughout until Truman makes his decision. Once he does, it cuts to the wide shot of him again to fully display him stepping out of the door and escape the prison manufactured for him. It also works to negate Christof's power over him as it isn't shot from a high angle like the majority of his shots within the scene.

Camera Shots

For this task, we had to experiment using different camera shots like low angle, close up... This is an example of cinematography and can be used to create meaning in a film.

Film Opening task - Location/sound/lighting

Location

For the location we had decided that we wanted to film in both the abbey graveyard and also the graveyard that's close to the train station. This is because the major plot point in the opening is that Tessa's younger sister has gone to the wrong graveyard. Therefore, we wanted the settings to be different when filming. However, when we came to film in the evening we ran into problems at the abbey due to the bell ringing group having a practise that night until 9pm which is when we wanted to be almost finished. As this ruined our sound, we had to move to the other graveyard and just shoot from different areas so it looked distinguishable. This wasted a lot of time as the actors had already blocked out the scene by the abbey and we had to walk with all of our equipment to a different location. The graveyard that we ended up filming in did work well though, because it actually seemed creepier than the other one and it didn't really matter about the background so this sped up filming as it was all in one location.

Sound

For the sound, we didn't have any microphones to pick up the actors voices better which did decrease the overall quality slightly. We were lucky because there wasn't any wind which could have ruined the audio however the bell ringing did make the footage that we filmed at the abbey unusable. There were some issues with the facetime footage as the audio disappeared when trying to edit the screen recordings in.

Lighting

With the lighting, at first we didn't have any big lights with us as we were hoping that the lights from phone screens and torches would be enough for the actors and the setting to be visible. However, it was a lot darker than expected which meant that there wasn't enough light to pick anything up with just the lighting that we had. This meant that two of us had to go and get more, bigger lights to illuminate the location. These did work well and meant that everything happening was actually visible on the camera. For some scenes it was a bit difficult as they needed to be concealed so that they couldn't be seen on camera but generally they worked well just being on the floor a few metres away from the actors. For the facetime footage, their phone screens were effective for illuminating the actors' faces.

Film opening task - Final hair /make-up choices

For filming, we let the actors do their own hair and make-up after giving them some pointers when talking about their characters. Due to us only deciding what the characters are like after casting, this meant that most of them stayed fairly similar in terms of appearance as their look already matched their character. The majority of them had light make-up on and some had their hair up, others down. The character Tessa had her hair in a side ponytail to try and convey that she was trying to look older. Overall we just wanted them to look like ordinary younger teenagers to make the opening seem more realistic.

Film Opening task - Hair/Makeup ideas

For hair and makeup, as we didn't decide to do an opening which required any wounds etc, there wasn't as much to think about other than how we wanted the characters to come across. As Sophia is the youngest character we decided that she shouldn't have any makeup to show the age gap and also that she should have her hair up potentially in pigtails or something similar. On the other hand, we thought that Tessa, the older sister, should have more obvious, excessive makeup as we wanted her to look like she was trying to appear older as well as her hair in a side ponytail, again to show that. For Billie and Emma we didn't think that obvious makeup was necessary as Billie is more of a tomboy character and Emma is more sensible. As Jessica is the more popular character, we thought that her makeup could potentially be a bit more obvious but not over the top. For their hair, we didn't have anything in particular that we wanted them to do as they are the age that we want them to be so we thought that their look fit the characters without changing much.

Film Opening task - Initial character ideas