It Happened One Night - Jessica N

The dominants of this shot are definitely Peter and Ellie, with the gaze going to Ellie’s face first because of the lighting on it, as opposed to the slight shadow over Peter’s from his hat, since they are arranged front and center in the foreground of the shot and take up most of the frame. The closeness of this eye-level shot, at medium range, really makes the audience feel an intimacy with the characters, as if we are more apart of their lives than those strangers walking around them; it makes us feel as if we are in on their conversation and witnesses to this budding romance. Since they are shot in profile though, looking only at each other, the audience is left out of the intimacy felt between the two of them only for each other; yet it gives us the time to analyze their body positions and how they feel about each other.

There really only seems to be two depths to this frame: the foreground occupied by the stars and the background consisting of the store and the random people walking through or sitting around. There is a shot close to this one though, where there seems to be a third depth added because a man walks right through the space between the lead characters and the back of the bus stop area and the people sitting in chairs near the back wall. This shot also gives the illusion of Peter and Ellie being in their own little world. One can see the intimacy between the two, with Ellie’s hand on his arm, and the rest of the world going on around them in a semi-blur, as if they don’t exist or no one else matters in their lives.

The shot is also very dense, with a lot of things going on in the background around them. There are benches in the frame to the left of them, shadowed as if someone were sitting there; there’s a man walking past another man sitting in the background reading a newspaper, while the walls are covered in magazines and photos. I think it’s the amount of stuff along the back wall that really adds to the density of this shot. The area seems to be pretty well lit, with shadows being cast by the props in the shot, making me think low-key lighting. While the main characters are well lit in the foreground and the man walking in the background and some of the pictures/magazines on the wall are brightly lit, there are many areas such as the shadow on the bench, and the shadows cast across the back area and from the man sitting are what lead me to believe this shot was done with low-key lighting.