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Influences DOPs and the genre

BEN DAVIS

DOP in numerous superhero films, such as Kick-ass, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Doctor Strange, and Captain Marvel.
The films I want to focus more on is Kick-ass and Captain Marvel because the audience gets to see how the main characters become superheroes and that is more relevant to our project "The 7 Billionth Hero".
In "Kick-ass" all of the superheroes are just people who don't have any special powers. The Protagonist decides to become a superhero and fight crime and starts a new superhero trend. 
There's a lot of interesting POV shots 
Mirror POV, when he's practicing what he's gonna say to the bad guys.
Phone camera   

I particularly like this film for lighting. Most of the fight scenes are filmed in low light and there's a contrast between his everyday life and his superhero life. It's bright, warm and slightly yellowish, but at the same time is very monotone to show the boredom and the routine the characters possess. 



On the other hand, there's his secret nightlife that's, even though is dark, colourfull. The light in the scenes is very cold and blue. 
SIMON CHAPMAN

I want to focus on Simon's work on Griff the Invisible as it's a low budget superhero film with an incredible colour palette. They have chosen yellow as their main colour that keeps on following the main character -  it's in his flat, his suit gas yellow details, even the buildings are yellow. There's also a clear difference between the shots of his mundane life and his superhero life. 
The office shots look very bland, blue and boring to create the feeling that the character has for the office - he's bored of it and gates his coworkers. There are several shots where Griff is distracted by something to show how he much rather be out there fighting crime.
One thing I really like about this film is its use of colour, especially yellow and how it surrounds the character. Wherever he goes there's gonna be a tough of yellow incorporated in set or costumes. This scene of him blending into the wall is by far my favourite. The other thing I noticed is that the outside scenes have a blueish greenish tint to it.
Meanwhile, the shots inside the buildings, with the exception of the office, have a yellow, orangy tint. Overall most colours are saturated so the ones that stand out would be yellow and blue.
Looking at the camera work, there's a lot of low angles for transitions, walking and etc. There are a lot of close-ups on Griff to make sure that the audience can see his reactions and facial expressions. 



A lot of superhero films have fight sequences that have a lot of different angles, usually, it starts and ends with a wide. It is popular to use the angle that's looking down as if the viewer was a god looking from above. (Andersson, 2015). Wides are used to set the scene and for action, there are some shots from above for some of the fight scenes. There are a lot of CUs, especially on the main character and their eyes. Although, we don't have any fight scenes in our film, we do incorporate the ECU on the eyes to show Catherine's emotion. Other pretty common traits for superhero films are the whip pan, which we didn't do while shooting the film, it was done in post as that way it was easier to see where it fits better. It also has really fast cutting and sound effects to make it more cartoonish, as our finished sequence is a montage to show the character unraveling and finding her passion it picks up the pace in the second half and we also added the sound effects. 



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