Session 9

First thing I can say about Session 9 is the environment and its colours! Greens, yellows, blues and browns everywhere. I thought the yellows and browns worked together really well, they are like darker tones of yellow making these brown tinted colours that blend quite nicely, almost like a bleached colour palette again. Remind me of the colours in L.A. Confidential. So it’s about these guys working on a huge house but strange things start to happen (like in any horror movie), the whole building however has this green glow to it, it reminds of the queens building we are working on now, it doesn’t look like it’s got a green glow to it but taking reference photographs the lighting gives off a luminous green glow, as if it’s been coated in acid or some sort of chemical making it appear more strange and scary? It’s ironic how we’re turning that place into a survival horror…

Anyway I distinctly remember that in the first few scenes of the movie the guys were sitting outside for a while, I noticed how the saturation was very high, coming back to the film Paris Texas though in the outside areas of that film like in the desert for example it is shot just how it is, very bright colour palette all of the time. And this movie being set in America you’d expect the same thing. I think that the house is basically used to break up the high saturation scenes because it’s suppose to be a horror movie, so basically you don’t want to be outside in the colourful daylight all the time else it would take away the genre?

There were a mixture of different scenes I can remember and the colour palette changed quite often. When they were inside the building the colours seemed to be green/yellow and different light and darker tones. The scenes in the basement were basically just black, but one thing that I thought was a bit of a cliché was that the youngest worker has a phobia of the dark… I mean the way they just put it out there like that was very bold and I thought: ‘okay it’s a horror movie and they’ve given the youngest worker (character) a fear of the dark’ I don’t know, personally I feel that was a bit ridicule especially when they made him go down to the basement on his own in pitch black darkness!

Besides that I thought it was a great movie, once last thing would be the scenes where the main character is listening to the session tapes. Basically at them points the viewer is trying to listen to what is being said so at the same time (because movies are meant to be watched) they trying to make use of the scenery and the characters facial expressions which sort of comes make to our character projects when we were experimenting with facial expressions, you sort of see how important it is especially in a horror movie.

Also the scenes outside you can see the grass, the trees and house it’s self again using bright (when in daylight) and darker tones in the overcast scenes. Then you’ve got either the yellows lighting from the sun or the sky which is blue. There’s also that bit of red that blends in with some of the browns in some shots (and when there’s gore). The colour palette reminds consistent throughout and makes use of them in every shot. The characters themselves remind mysterious like the house itself and the tapes and your finding out different things about them from start to end.