L.A. Confidential

L.A confidential is one of those films were you have to watch it maybe a few times to understand it better. The first time you’ll try to understand the plot, the second time you’ll probably understand the environment and settings more and then the third time probably the characters is what you’ll understand more. What I mean is at first you’re always just going for the plot really but after this you’re looking for other things and asking yourself why all the time. As an Artist you would sort of questions things all the time just by looking around yourself, questioning the visual elements in front of you.

In this film, straight away like the Machinist, I noticed the colour palette, it was before the film described to us as very bleached and simply put, it was. The more notable colours in the film were yellows, oranges, browns and reds; it really gave it that 1950’s feel. The first few scenes were enough to draw you into the 1950’s decade set in Los Angeles.

It sort of felt like me as a viewer was there in the scene with them in the city as they captured a really strong interpretation of the time it is set in. When I heard the word ‘bleached’ and saw the different tones of colour throughout the film it felt as someone literally threw a lot of bleach over the finished outcome and what I mean is it felt as if they had captured the footage in a modern specific style with a limited colour palette and then the colours were faded to look less vibrant.

The Art direction was very good, this week we talked about how it’s hard to pull off certain things within a game but how because all the questions in film have just about been answered it a case of picking something you like or want to do and just film it from A to B. In gaming its quite different however, we don’t use real actors or environments or anything real, we have to take environments and characters and re-create them in 2D and 3D were there are certain limitations. In gaming for example it’s harder to re-create and make a character act to how we do in real life.

The characters in the film just sort of float onto the stage without even saying anything they give an almost immediate impact on the view telling you about them. For example the way Danny Devito or Russell Crowe just show up and just from the way they are dressed, their body language and the way they talk tell you their characteristics which again can be very hard to pull off in gaming. On which the costumes were really good in capturing the feel of what a L.A. police officer or detective would look like in them days, it shows that good costume design can show a lot add to how the character is portrayed. It had great Art direction and a great story line to go with it, one I’d watch again.