Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Resource for Movie Screenshots

In his cinematography website, Evan E. Richards presents entire movies as a series of screenshots.
Screenshots from Amelie
Seeing a film broken down into as many as 400 individual frames makes this a helpful reference site for illustrators, storyboarders, concept artists, production designers, cinematographers, photographers, and art teachers. Above are a few samples from Amelie.


With animated films, like The Incredibles, it's interesting to check the design language of the final frames against the color script developed before production.

Seeing screenshots of Hugo reminded me of a lighting continuity issue that was so distracting to me that it took me out of the film. When shooting the dialog coverage, director Martin Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson reset the lights for all the closeups so that the actors were always backlit.

It makes for pretty lighting, but it's an impossibility. If one person is backlit, the person they're facing must be front-lit.
Ben Hur (1959)
There's a lot of inspirational reference for illustrators, such as 1959 epic Ben Hur.


You can click on the individual frames to get a large blowup. In Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, it's exciting to see how almost every shot is a revelation in set design and lighting.
-----
Evan E. Richards
Index of films on his site
Here's a similar website called "Film Grab"

5 comments:

Tom Hart said...

What a great resource! (again, one I never would have stumbled across if it were not for Gurney Journey).

I just clicked around the site very briefly. The resolution of the individual screen shot enlargements is wonderful and would make great reference pieces - with, of course, the proper considerations for copyright.

I did take me just a minute or two of clicking around before I realized that the screenshots are accessed via the cinematography tab. Also - I don't know if it's my browwer or not - but clicking on Evan's name on the GJ post didn't take me directly to his site, but rather to my own Blogger profile. Clicking on the individual screenshot buttons on GJ did take me to those directly, however.

James Gurney said...

Thanks for letting me know about the bad links, Tom. I sometimes forget to check them out. I've replaced the links on his name to take you right to his Cinematography section.

Janet Oliver said...

What Tom Hart said ^. I'm so glad JGGJ is here. Fantastic resource, thank you, James!

Evan E. Richards said...

Oh, nice. I'm 5 years late, but thanks for giving my site a bump.
Cheers!

Evan

Evan E. Richards said...

Oh nice! I'm 5 years late, but thanks for giving my site a bump.

Cheers
Evan