Compose Your Frame (Visceral Response)

This is a picture that my sister-in-law took of my niece Hannah. This picture is not only adorable thanks to the cute subject, but it follows the rules we talked about when it comes to still composition.

Obviously the focus of the picture is one Hannah, who is not in the center of the picture. It is appealing to our eyes because she is right on the point of the bottom square of the tic-tac-toe board. The movement of her eyes(the index vector), and her laughter then take your eyes up towards Santa Clause. He is barely in the frame, but the law of closure let's us feel that it is a human and that he indeed has a head. Lastly, the diagonal rule is utilize by the ground. It's not as dynamic as horizontally placed lines, but it does fulfill the linear element of the picture.

There is a whole lot else going on in this picture with the tree, lights, presents, and decorations but our focus is where it needs to be and on the most important objects/people in the picture.

Favorite Director

I'm finding it hard to narrow it down to one director. I'm not that hard of a critic when it comes to film either. I enjoy many different genres of film and find it hard to pick just one director that I like. I will say that Vince Gilligan is one of my favorite writers and producers, but I couldn't find much about him on directing films... so I can't pick him. I'm sure he did a lot of directing on his shows, but for the sake of the exercise I'll move on to someone else.

The lucky director who wins my vote for "favorite director" is... Jared Hess. I know it's kind of a weird choice, but his movies are just soooooo dumb that they're funny. I knew other people were going to pick Speilberg, Scott, Lucas, Burton, etc. so I thought I would pick someone different. Napoleon Dynomite is one of the biggest movie surprises of all time. Nobody expected it to be so funny and widely successful, but what I think made it successful was that everybody could think of people in their lives who were like the characters in the movie. The one that I enjoyed th most was Uncle Rico. We all know of people who reminisce the glory days, and hype them up to be something way larger than they actually were. Nacho Libre was great before serving a mission in South America, but was even funnier once I could laugh at all the subtle jokes there were in that movie. He hasn't done much outside of those as far as I know of (except for something called Gentleman Broncos), but it could be safe to say that he quit while he was ahead. And for me, makes me like him even more. Not trying to milk his movies for all their worth, and losing some real fans in the process.