joewright:Academy Award Winners for Best Cinematography:2007 — Guillermo Navarro, ASCPan’s Labyrinth
joewright:Academy Award Winners for Best Cinematography:2007 — Guillermo Navarro, ASCPan’s Labyrinth / El laberinto del fauno(2006)Directed by Guillermo del ToroAspect Ratio: 1.85 : 1According to Del Toro, the key element in the design of Pan’s Labyrinth was color. “I put up a big board to color-code the movie for the three key departments,” he says, referring to Navarro, production designer Eugenio Caballero and costume designer Lala Huete. “Those were the colors that were allowed. If it wasn’t there, it wouldn’t exist [in the film].” The initial color differentiation between the film’s two worlds was simple: Ofelia’s fantasy world would feature mainly warm colors, primarily “deep crimsons and golden ambers, almost like amniotic fluids,” notes Del Toro. (Indeed, the director’s goal was to suggest a “womblike” environment in some of the fairy-tale sets, a feeling underscored by the use of rounded shapes.) This warmth also infuses the worlds of the rebel fighters in the nearby hills and the friendly housekeeper, Mercedes, who secretly aids the rebels and befriends Ofelia. By contrast, the harsh reality represented by Vidal and his troops is coded in cold hues of blue and green, and many of their environments feature sharp angles. As the story unfolds and the parallel narratives start to, in Navarro’s words, “bridge over and rub together,” the colors begin to mix in quite striking ways. “I decided that we were going to do a contamination process, that one world was going to start infecting the other,” says Del Toro. “As the movie goes on, they combine more and achieve a unity, and Ofelia’s view of the world becomes as real as the fascists’.” By using color as their key, says Navarro, “we found the language we needed to help the audience understand the complexity of the movie.” — [x] -- source link