David Fincher - Director

David Fincher is an American film director and producer. However, he has also worked in television. Widely known, he has been nominated several times for academy awards for the films 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' and 'The Social Network' gaining him recognition as a successful film director. His other projects include 'Fight Club', 'Seven' and more recently 'Gone Girl'. Having seen several of his films including many of those titles, I decided to look at him as part of my research. Fincher began to love making films from a very young age, making movies with an 8mm camera. As he worked his way into the industry he worked for several production companies including 'Industrial Light' and 'Magic. One thing I have noticed from his films is the use of quite a dark color scheme, often choosing black as the most accentuated color. This gives his films a dark edge which is then usually combined with a color overlay often reflecting the tone of the film. For example in Fight Club, you can see tones of black and blue frequently throughout which is symbolizing the bruising the participants of the club are enduring. In 'Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' the colors used are also quite blue toned whic
h compliments the icy, cold setting of the film. Another technique he often uses in his films is that he will cleverly use shadowing to conceal or partly conceal a characters face so that we don't know who they are. This creates quite a dynamic appearance and allows the audience to be shown small hints to later events without revealing them straight away therefore keeping the audience on their feet. The use of color and lighting will be important in the scene I have chosen because I will be including some hard lighting in order to create some tension in the scene and give the impression of a spot light on the suspects. I haven't explored color tones very much in previous work so that is something I will be looking into for my scene to heighten the tension or set the mood of the scene.