Interviewee: Carman Liu
Date: 13/02/2019
Yang Shuran Freya: The styles of the two clips, The Office (2015) and The Grandmaster (2013), are quite different. The former one is more modern and relaxing, and the later one is more ancient and serious, and both of them use the skills of framing. I wonder how the frame can affect the atmospheres in the movies? Are there any underlying general architectural principles or rules about framing that help the atmosphere creation?
Carman Liu:
For The Office, from the beginning, they already designed all the sets. Everything is supposed to be minimum and skeleton light. For example, if you want a room, you don’t have to build a physical wall for the room, you just need to build the door frame without the door. But for The Grandmaster, it is more periodic and as real as possible. You could see the real sets and props. Lots of Wong Kar Wai’s movies are like that. He is a realistic director. Also, these kinds of visual direction usually were set before I was involved. We need to be modern for this one and be historical and periodic for that one. The set design is not personal in architecture because you have to design for the clients and the films. That’s the difference between set design and artists, which you can do whatever you want.
Review:
- The styles of the films can be different in terms of the methods to construct the frames. The production teams can use either the props and fake background sets to create a modern and light environment or the real materials, walls, decorations and column to form a more serious and historical one.
- The styles of the films not only depend on the frames created by the architectural design teams but also are the results after the consideration of the directors and the producers in terms of the themes and plots of the films.
- The frames in the films play an essential role to draw the audiences’ attention to somewhere being captured by the camera. Therefore, the architects can have an impact on the visual effect of the films by creating frames with various materials and component in the sets.
By Yang Shuran (UID:3035448548)