Cinematography Final

Guillermo Del Toro wants his monsters to be sophisticated. He wants them to be intellectually appealing. He also wants his monsters to have visual depth. All of of these qualities bring his monsters to life. In the film “The Devil's Backbone” he uses a ghost as the epitome of being a monster. The physique of the ghost is damaged. It's body is decaying. As time passes by the ghost's body decays more and more. This creation of Del Toro' s monster fleshes out his craftsmanship. Throughout the movie you can perceive the ghost's physiology and conclude that it is anthropologically correct. In the film “Pan's Labyrinth” Del Toro invents his monsters in a fairytale mythological style. According to Del Toro, the key element in the design of “Pan’s Labyrinth” was color. He puts up a big board to color-code the movie for the three key departments referring to Navarro, production designer Eugenio Caballero and costume designer Lala Huete. Those were the colors that were allowed. In the Pale Man’s intensely warm environment, which is dominated by red tones and a blazing fire, Navarro’s lighting team was faced with similarly limited options. In the corridor Ofelia walks through to reach the dining room, small skylight-like holes were built into the ceiling to allow for sources. They brought in something fairly soft from there, just so there would be a little bit of level as she walked through. Rick Stribling and Lee rigged Source Four Lekos around the holes and bounced them into white or silver cards. Then they had places to plug in small lamps hidden throughout the hallway. They also hung 150-watt Linestra tubes on the backsides of the columns and then taped them until they were doing something that did not look like they’d just hidden light bulbs everywhere. Sometimes they put an Arri 150 or 300 on the floor and bounced it into something, but this was rarely possible because the camera moved so much and saw so much.