Research Into Similar Products: Lynne Ramsay

Lynne Ramsay

Lynne Ramsay is a film director is is well known and praised for her placement of frames. She focuses on detail and what the frame involves. Ramsay pays close attention to the emotions of her characters and how they are portrayed.

Above is a video that analyses Lynne Ramsay's work and how she manages to pull of such detail and poetic work. After 2 minutes I love how the speaker spills Ramsay's secret of how she manages to create so much with so little. Majority of Ramsay's plot is portrayed through the detail and we are told that she brings the audience's attention to an object in a frame, not by putting a lot of things in the frame but by taking things out, this allows the audience to focus on one object at a time. At 2:15 into the video we see shots of one of her films which include a man in a dark room, placing his body into various positions. Low key lighting is used to keep the room almost black and keep the focus on him as his body is outlined by the light. These shots weave the plot and expose the true meaning of the film that Ramsay is trying to portray from her usage of such detailed frames.

At 3:10, we are also told about her camera angle choices and why she chooses to at particular times just leave certain parts of a characters body out of the frame. Through this, the audience cannot receive important information for example when a characters eyes are kept out of the frame or when their face isn't even in the frame. This leads to the audience being forced to be a part of the film and guess their emotion. The audience knows what the characters are feeling, but Ramsay's choice to keep that away engulfs the viewers into the film. We are never told what to feel about characters and a sense of mystery remains, which deepens the attention of the viewers.

This video also explains Ramsay's choices for actors which star in her films. She chooses the most natural actors. She wants her actors to not look like actors, but to create the illusion that this is their life and the film is just showing their everyday story. As if the film is just their life and it hasn't been scripted and the scenes haven't been shot over and over again to get the perfect clip. Ramsay says " the best actors for me are the people that are like non-professional actors, you can't tell where the film ends or begins, as if the actors are the same on screen as they are off screen. They just feel real."

This great amount of detail is what I want to feature in my music video. I want to portray the message of the music in the detail. As I want the women to be confident and for the camera to exaggerate that, I need to have the women present in a frame with a minimal amount of objects in it so the audience's attention aimed at the woman and her strong attitude. I could use Ramsay's methods and adapt them to portray confidence and power as well as respect among the women that star in my video.