(Originally Posted March 9th, 2016)
Your assignment this week is to carefully compare how Burton introduces the neighborhood of Edward Scissorhands to the audience. This is done three times, and each time Burton employs different cinematic techniques that influence heavily our understanding of mood and tone. You need not compare all three introductions (although you may); choose two at a minimum.
Because I cannot come up with another movie that introduces the same setting in a variety of ways, I'll provide you with some guidance regarding these particular scenes, which I have cut and uploaded to YouTube for you. As a result, I will not have my version of the assignment at the end, but I hope that the direction that I provide prove to be useful regardless. I will specifically focus on details of Mood and Tone. I will, however, describe how I would approach the assignment at the bottom of this post.
REGARDING MOOD
Here are a bunch of words that relate to mood. There are many more. Click to expand.
Mood is the creation of an atmosphere or general feeling that is experienced by the audience. This emotional response is one that you naturally feel, so you should trust your gut when trying to identify mood. In film, mood is most commonly created through the effective use of lighting, color, setting, and sound.
Lighting
Traditionally, the difference between high and low lighting in an environment tells the reading whether or not the mood is a positive or negative one. High key lighting - lighting that creates a brightly lit scene - can convey happiness, good fortune, peacefulness, moral goodness, or a host of other things. Low key lighting - which creates predominantly dark or shadowy scenes - tends to suggest danger, evil, despair, and more. There are figurative reasons for this.
In a scene that is brightly lit, there is not much space for discomfort; when you are able to see the details of a setting well, there is less reasons to suspect hidden, possibly negative elements. Because it is physically easier to see these details, you do not have to strain your eyes, which allows us to feel more at ease. As a result, if there is nothing to hide and we are calm, it is easier to trust and believe in the goodness present in the setting. Low key lighting has an opposite effect, obscuring details and creating discomfort and the suggestion of something being concealed. This is how we experience the real world too. Exploring an old department store or abandoned house in the bright of day sounds like adventurous fun, but in the pitch of night?
For these reasons, when comparing the introductions to the neighborhood, consider carefully the way light is being used to affect how comfortable you are in the scene.
Color
Color works in much the same way as lighting, but it - arguably - has more to say. This is because colors have a close relationship with emotional already. We often associate blue with sadness (or calmness), red with anger (or sometimes love and passion), and green with a closeness to nature (or jealousy). Our emotional connection with color is complex, which allows color to express complex ideas.
When looking for mood in the use of color in film, focus on how particular colors (or sets of colors) are associated with different places. If you notice a pattern in regard to which colors are used for particular settings, there is probably something to be said about the mood. If the use of setting color changes dramatically (such as a white room becoming darker or colored with some red), the mood may also be changing dramatically!
Setting
The setting of the film can tell you a great deal about mood. Look carefully at the design of the buildings and items in the scene. If the shapes or proportions of items in the scene are distorted, the director may be trying to make you uncomfortable. The organization and similarity in the shapes or placement of items can show that a setting is especially orderly, but too much organization or sameness can suggest blandness. Meanwhile, a lack of order can feel chaotic.
It is also worth considering the space of the setting. If the area of the setting is especially small, the director might be trying to make you feel claustrophobic. An especially large space can feel more free, but it can also potentially be intimidating.
Sound
Sound is potentially the biggest clue to mood in a film, and is instrumental (no pun intended) in creating an emotional response in the audience. In horror films, directors will often use background music - non-diegetic sound - to create anticipation, ambiguity, or uncertainty, which helps build suspense. The difficulty with music is that it can often be difficult to describe; saying that the music is "happy" is not a description of the sound but an inference about the effect of the sound. To describe sound, it can often be best to describe the instruments used, the features of the music (rhythm, volume, etc), or make use of an onomatopoeia (words that sound like that sound when you say them outline). In these clips, consider the effect that the music (or lack of music) has on you.
Diegetic sound can also contribute to mood, but often to a lesser extent. The sounds that we hear that occur in the scene can help us feel emotions that are similar to those felt by the characters in the film. A creaking floorboard or wind that blows through an empty house can add to a feeling of desolation or discomfort, for example.
Other Techniques
It is important to be aware that other techniques can be used to influence our understanding of mood. A camera that is at an odd angle can express how disorderly or uncontrolled a situation is (see my post on the Dutch Angle for examples), and an energetic, shaky camera can add to the feeling of chaos in an action scene. Any technique can contribute to mood, so you must rely on your own interpretation through close analysis.
REGARDING TONE
Here are a bunch of tone words. There are many more. Click to expand.
Tone is an attitude that the author of a text appears to be expressing for the subjects of the text. In a written text, this can be fairly easy to determine; the descriptive words used to characterize a person can reveal this attitude without requiring analysis. When Roald Dahl describes Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's Augustus Gloop as "blown up with a powerful pump" we can be certain that Dahl wants us to know that the boy is not just fat, but comically so. Describing him as a "monstrous ball of dough" reveals that he is almost lacking the features that make someone appear human, which tells us that he really is like a little monster, one who isn't actually meant to be taken seriously.
Tone in film can be more challenging. To understand tone, we often need to consider perspective. For example, in the first and third introductions to the neighborhood, Edward is looking at the neighborhood. The first clip occurs just before we see him looking out his window (not included in the above clip), and the third includes Edward moving through the scene in Peg's car. Because Edward is experiencing these scenes as we are, we can infer that the cinematic techniques being used are connected with his experience. So when the camera is placed at a low angle as he is looking at the object on screen, we can assume that this low angle represents his experience, which might mean that the object seems impressive, powerful, or intimidating to him. Edward's perception of these things is the attitude he has toward them: his tone.
For us to understand the tone that Burton is using toward Edward, we must focus on how he is portrayed, and for that it is often best to focus on the camera.
Camera
The way the camera focuses on a character call tell us a great deal about how the director wants us to feel about them. The easiest to make sense of are angled shots. Low angles place the camera at a lower position and angle up to the subject, making them look bigger, more capable, prepared, or another similar attribute. There is something heroic in this, and the audience is literally made to look up to the subject. We might root for subjects shot in this way or we might fear their power. The high angle often does the opposite, creating a camera that presses in on the subject from above, showing how overwhelmed, small, or powerless they are. The director makes us literally look down on them, sometimes in disgust, in pity, or a variety of other ways. While these changes to angle create an emphasis in tone, a more neutral tone can sometimes come from the eye level shot. These are shot at the same height of the character's eyes and literally put the audience on the same level of the character, which can help us to relate to them or their experience.
Characters and objects can also be framed in such a way as to create tone. Close-ups allow us to see emotion, which may allow us to sympathize with a character who is in pain or champion a character overcoming it. The further away the camera gets, the less connected the audience tends to feel to the character, sometimes to the point where the character appears lonesome or abandoned, creating pity in the audience.
There are a thousand different ways a camera can be used, and even more possible interpretations of a scene as a result. The important thing is to consider with tone is how you feel toward the subject of the scene. If you feel sympathy, disgust, admiration, or disdain, the odds are pretty good the author wants you to feel this way because he also feels this. This is tone.
How I would Do It
So how would I do this assignment? The first thing I would do is watch the clips above and choose two that I think create an interesting comparison. You could choose to do all three, but two would allow me to create a detailed comparison rather than trying to stuff it with details of all three clips. The next thing I would do is come up with a statement about the clips. While I talked at length about mood and tone above, your analytical statement does not need to be about mood or tone. I could choose to write about a theme that I think is supported by two of the clips ("even the ordinary can be wonderful if we appreciate our surroundings" perhaps?). Writing about symbolism that is emphasized by Burton's use of techniques would be great! There are many options, so I need to find something that I find interesting when I look at those clips side by side.
Even if I am not writing specifically about mood or tone, I am considering the cinematic technique details I wrote about above as I prepare to write. Ultimately I'm going to write an analytical statement (similar to those that we are working on in Springboard) that identifies the text, the director, the use of contrasting introductory scenes, and makes an inference about the director's intention in creating the comparison. In the body paragraphs I would need to describe how a cinematic technique is used in one introduction, describe how it is used in the second, give a detailed account of how they differ, and include multiple sentences that explain the significance of these changes. After making and supporting multiple conclusions of this sort, I would include a concluding paragraph that wraps things up and reasserts my original statement.
With any luck this post is useful. Let me know if you have any questions or if there are questions you would like me to address.