Freeze Frame | Drawing-Illustration

“Freeze Frame”: A Study in Light and Shadow

Intro:

Light and shadow serve many purposes in the visual arts:

Compositional shapes and textures create balance and tension

Compositional direction - where to look

Heightened drama

Mood

Inspo: Film Noir

"Film Noir is one of Hollywood’s only organic artistic movements. Beginning in the early 1940s, numerous screenplays inspired by hardboiled American crime fiction were brought to the screen, primarily by European émigré directors who shared a certain storytelling sensibility: highly stylized, overtly theatrical, with imagery often drawn from an earlier era of German “expressionist” cinema. Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, and Otto Preminger, among others, were among this Hollywood vanguard.

During and immediately following World War II, movie audiences responded to this fresh, vivid, adult-oriented type of film — as did many writers, directors, cameramen and actors eager to bring a more mature world-view to Hollywood product. Largely fueled by the financial and artistic success of Billy Wilder’s adaptation of James M. Cain’s novella Double Indemnity (1944), the studios began cranking out crime thrillers and murder dramas with a particularly dark and venomous view of existence."

- https://www.filmnoirfoundation.org/filmnoir.html

Research:

Watch Night of the Hunter (in class)

The Third Man

Pickup on South Street

All About Eve

Double Indemnity

A Touch of Evil

another classic Film Noir

Process:

1. Take 10 Screen Shots and create a pinterest board in class you can include ones in the PPT below. 10/20

2. Make a thumbnail of each using charcoal or ink Due 10/23