MentalPolyphonics
Where have all the plumbers gone?
One thing that was sad was people emphasizing...I’ve been digging the photography in Dexter recently (season four at this writing). Here are two shots I found striking enough to want to share from recent episodes.
The first is a shot of Anton in the hospital. The angles dance around this shot, you can’t just show stuff from a static cam all the time, but I get the feeling this is angle-as-story-boarded. Anton’s shirt is pink, and deep pink (magenta) is a color that doesn’t exist. All colors have complements which are visible except green, whose complement is magenta. Green, as we all know from elementary school is yellow and blue.
The complement of the combination of the wall colors, which Anton’s head bisects, is the color of his shirt. That, I think, is the color theory logic that went into this shot, which is very well-framed. His head is centered on the corner joining two different walls, a standard dialog-framing trick:
That’s very similar to the color theory used to balance Gabe and Tycho in most frames of Penny Arcade — blue, yellow, and a desaturated background magenta.
Second is one from Sunday night’s episode, where Morgan hunts a photographer, Farrow, and they have brief discussion of photographic aesthetics before Dexter darkly dreams. Dex uses a themed kill-surface, the photographer’s light table, to restrain him this time. I wanted to see red lit from below on it to contrast the blues of the image (also per their discussion), but the production team didn’t go there:
The camera turns clockwise in this shot, matching Dexter’s motion around to stand over and behind Farrow’s head. The white square with the black one beneath forms a spinning star. I don’t like the framing because the point of the table-star falls below the bottom of the broadcast image. I wonder if starting further back, zoomed out, would have unbalanced the shot with too much negative space on either side.
(DP == Director of Photography == Cinematographer)
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