Category: David Fincher

Watching the Music Videos of David Fincher

Posted by Sean W. Fallon | Aug 30, 2017
Audiences Everywhere

David Fincher has developed a very distinct style over the years as he has cemented himself as one of our most impressive technical filmmakers. Fincher has a great hold on characters and story, but he stands out because his mechanical, almost robotic, style of filmmaking is so recognisable and effective. His movies are distinguishable by a number of trademarks and signature moves. Fincher likes washed-out colours with lots of metallic blues and greys along with crushed blacks, which makes his movies seem as though they’re being projected to us on a piece of frozen metal. He also avoids handheld camera work, opting instead for a locked down camera that pans and pivots around a scene with balanced, unnatural movement, which enhances the feeling of an omniscient camera that is operating independently of a human being and not subject to control. He also enjoys locking the camera in place and filming wide, stationary shots as though we are watching the action play out on a stage at a theatre.

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How a Thinking Filmmaker Films Thinking: The Shot-By-Shot Slow Burn of David Fincher

Posted by Brandi Blahnik | Aug 28, 2017
Audiences Everywhere

One of the most challenging aspects of storytelling is showing a character thinking. It might sound like a straightforward task, but think about what you look like while studying. Ever watched someone complete a puzzle? It’s a quiet, meditative task marked by trial and error. In reality, there’s remarkably little head-scratching or furrowed brows. Visually, it’s rather unimpressive.

So how does a creator reveal thinking—poring over material, investigative work, head-buried-in-clues research—without absolutely boring the audience? How does a director reinvent frustration, the false lead, the maddening search, particularly over a two-hour film?

David Fincher has made a career of chronicling that very process.

Not only has Fincher produced some of the most haunting detective sequences in film—Se7en, Zodiac, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo—but you’d be unlikely to find criticism calling his films boring. He’s a master at tension-building and unapologetic about his resolutions. Perhaps this is why so many of his characters fall prey to their own obsessive madness. The unraveling of a character is something Fincher portrays with patience and deliberateness.

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Cross-Examining David Fincher’s Interrogations

Sheryl Oh
August 8, 2017
Film School Rejects

Allegiances are never simple in a Fincher film.

David Fincher makes some seriously memorable films. That’s like saying water is wet, but his movies are impeccably crafted without seeming ostentatious or painfully clinical. Arguably, the best part about his films is the talking. You won’t find a film of his where character dynamics aren’t laid bare in the form of a lengthy conversation. Literally putting words on screen has been a landmark of his since the beginning of his film career.

Notably, many of Fincher’s movies crescendo to significant arguments and interrogations, and it is never just run-of-the-mill grilling. He has the ability to make talking – for want of a better term – interesting. Part of what makes his interrogations so enveloping and immersive is the insistent, intimate focus on the subjects at hand. Characters are thrust into settings but also command them in cinematically satisfying ways:

Fincher gives us just enough of any given setting, and the details are always overshadowed by the manner in which the characters move and interact within them. (Jones, 44)

Fincher has a new Netflix series coming out in a couple of months; one which will undoubtedly feature some of his signature wordy conversations. While awaiting the release of Mindhunter, we examine what it takes for him to put together the perfect interrogation scene.

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The Average Shot Length of David Fincher Films

By 
07 Aug 2017
VashiVisuals

Analyzing the average shot length (ASL) of films / TV / music videos can be very telling or completely irrelevant. Taken as its own metric…it is just a number. The supposition that action / thriller / sci-fi films genres have a shorter ASL is statistically accurate but that does not mean a longer ASL means less tension, action, drama or intensity.

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Here’s Every Single One of the 2,400 Shots in ‘Gone Girl’ and Other Fincher Movies

Liz Nord
August 9, 2017
No Film School

Thanks to film editor Vashi Nedomansky, you can take a bird’s eye view of some popular David Fincher films and analyzing every single shot used.

Art of the Title: David Fincher

David Fincher: A Film Title Retrospective

August 27, 2012
Art of the Title

Interiors: The spaces in David Fincher’s films

Interiors

Interiors is an online film and architecture journal, published by Mehruss Jon Ahi and Armen Karaoghlanian, that analyses and diagrams films in terms of space.

 

A Pair of Artists Use Architecture to Study Film

The founders of “Interiors,” a journal dedicated to film and architecture, diagram scenes from movies such as “Fight Club,” “Psycho,” and more.

Colin Warren-Hicks
January 30, 2014
Metropolis

 

INTERIORS: David Fincher

If cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame, David Fincher is an artist who is very much concerned about all four corners of his canvas.

by INTERIORS Journal
June 3, 2013
ArchDaily

 

Panic Room (2002)

“Their positioning throughout the scene provides us with an understanding of how David Fincher uses space within the film, and in doing so, how he also maintains the architectural integrity of the film.”

Mehruss Jon Ahi and Armen Karaoghlanian
2012-01
Interiors

 

Se7en (1995)

“The vastness of the desert around them emphasizes the fact that the handcuffed John Doe is captured; a lack of freedom despite the free space around him.”

Mehruss Jon Ahi and Armen Karaoghlanian
2013-01
Interiors

 

Fight Club (1999)

“David Fincher switches from a subjective perspective onto an objective perspective after the reveal has been made.”

Mehruss Jon Ahi and Armen Karaoghlanian
2014-01
Interiors

David and Brad seem impressed by the latest toy from RED

Jarred Land (Facebook)
Jarred Land (Instagram)
July 7, 2017

Crazy. Last night it seems the entire the world was arguing over how insane we were (again) and how the Hydrogen display we are promising is just simply impossible. […]

Read the full announcement:

Facebook
Instagram

Order here: http://www.red.com/hydrogen
Link to PDF: http://www.red.com/hydrogen.pdf

More details by Jim Jannard, founder of RED, on the RED User forums.

Thanks to mikez