Notable Directing Styles

Have you ever wanted to find your own voice and style?

I remember being interviewed by a producer that was looking for a director. He was looking for a specific type of voice and style for his production and asked me to describe my voice. Back then, I didn’t know better than to say somewhere between tenor and baritone.

But he, of course, wanted to understand my visual voice as a director. I realized that studying a handful of directors and their styles would help me better understand my style. So I thought this article might help you do the same.

The first step is understanding the labels used to describe existing notable styles.

The art of filmmaking has come a long way since its inception in the late 19th century. The early pioneers of cinema are responsible for laying the foundation of this artistic medium, which has influenced society, culture, and politics.

Over the years, several great film directors have emerged, each bringing their unique style and creativity to the screen. With each style comes a platform to make a significant contribution to the industry and our culture.

When I mention box office dollars, they are the current ones on the day I published this article and were provided by The-Numbers.com.

Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg brought in $10.7B in ticket sales worldwide and has won three Academy Awards, including two for Best Director (Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan). Two of his most successful films are “Jurassic Park” (1993) and “Jaws” (1975).

Spielberg invented the blockbuster style with the release of “Jaws” and is known for his ability to create engaging and emotional stories that resonate with audiences worldwide. His signature film was E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982).

James Cameron

James Cameron is right on Spielberg’s heels, with gross receipts of $8.7B. However, if you thought his films brought in more than Spielberg’s, you would be right. It took Spielberg 36 films to hit $10.7B, and Cameron hit $8.7B with 14 films. He is likely to surpass Spielberg within the next five years. However, these numbers are only based on what the artists did as directors. Spielberg’s box office dollars as a DreamWorks producer are not counted in this report.

Cameron is best known for The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986), Titanic (1997), and Avatar (2009). All of which were so popular they became franchises.

Cameron’s style is action-driven. His characters are always type-A personalities and often command each other. To further drive the story, Cameron is known for switching between sound effects and music to shift the audience’s emotions. His technique might even drop the soundtrack to near-silence and then build suspense with the volume to draw the audience to the edge of their seats.

Alfred Hitchcock

Regarded as the “Master of Suspense,” Alfred Hitchcock, an English film director, was known for his innovative camera techniques and ability to manipulate audiences’ emotions. His films were a perfect blend of horror, suspense, and drama. Two of his most successful films are “Psycho” (1960) and “Vertigo” (1958).

During his career, Hitchcock developed many techniques that altered cinema. He dedicated his legacy to pioneering innovations in film grammar. For instance, he created the zoom dolly shot where the camera zooms in while it is being dollied out, creating visual disorientation and emotional destabilization.

Hitchcock also popularized the MacGuffin. A MacGuffin (muh-GUFF-in) is an object, character, or event in a story that keeps the plot in motion despite lacking intrinsic value or importance. In Star Wars, George Lucas used R2D2 as a MacGuffin.

While Hitchcock was deemed one of the greatest directors of all time, he never won an Oscar for Best Director. Still, his style revolutionized the industry, brought him 32 prestigious awards, and pleased droves of audiences for several generations.

Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese’s films reflect the gritty realities of life, infused with elements of violence, crime, and passion. He added to the legitimizing of profanity and violence more than other directors. He bared the souls of his characters to reveal their darkness, complexity, irony, and contradictions.

He grew up in Little Italy during the 1960s, where boys had two career choices: the priesthood or the mafia. He found a third alternative in filmmaking where he explored the good and bad within him. If there was a rule to break in filmmaking, Scorsese would find a way to break it.

He won numerous awards, including an Academy Award for Best Director for his film “The Departed” (2006). His other successful films include “Goodfellas” (1990) and “Taxi Driver” (1976).

I could share another 100 directors that impacted society due to their stylistic choices. But the examples I’ve given are a good start in helping you realize that what a director brings to the industry, based on who they are, impacts the way the film informs culture. Therefore, if a director wants to impact our culture, he or she must find their voice and style.

Copyright © 2023 by CJ Powers

Best Director’s Required Mastery

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The Oscars are right around the corner, and many people need to know what the director does to deserve the Best Director award. The director is the one that owns the vision for the film and translates the literary screenplay to the screen. In doing both, he makes the film his story while hopefully honoring the writer’s initial intent.

To pull these activities off, the director must address the following:

Understand the Story

The director must read the script multiple times. The first read is the emotional read. This will give the director an understanding of the heartfelt story elements and emotional undertones.  This first read is critical as it can never be done over.

The director only gets one first read to measure the emotional thread of the story. The nuanced vibe of the first read can never be recreated, so the director must read the story from top to bottom without stopping.

The subsequent reads allow the director to learn about the characters, themes, and tone. Each read-through will reveal new details and help the director identify the key elements that must come across on screen. Good directors take notes, analyze the plot structure, and review the character arcs.

Meet with the Writer

Meeting with the writer is a must. Not all writers can capture their vision on paper as clearly as others. The director can gain insights into the characters, settings, plot, and themes by meeting with the writer. Questions can be asked to clarify the character’s intentions and motivations.

The best discussion covers the central theme/message, the universal question, and the main character’s internal and external change. These must be crystal clear to translate the screenplay to the screen properly.

Break Down the Script

The director must break down every scene to understand the main character’s goal, obstacles, actions, conflict, and consequences. If one of those elements is missing from a scene, the director must decide how to adjust the story or drop the scene.

Directors are typically hit with about 1,000 questions every day during production. To answer these questions correctly and confidently, he must understand how the scene is a cohesive part of the story. Each decision is integral to enhancing the story and reinforcing the theme.

Visualize the Story

The Director’s Notebook is a great place to capture the style and visualization of the story. Some filmmakers use child-like chicken scratchings, craft or department-oriented codes, and rough sketches to make their stylistic decisions more visual. This way, the director can bring his vision to life and share his ideas with the production trinity (Production Designer and Director of Photography).

To bring their vision to life, the director develops a style that is all his own. Keep in mind that some directors have several different styles depending on the type of film created. For instance, the director might choose to express different moods using bright colors for a kids’ show and muted darker tones for a drama.

The visual style is tied to conversations with the production trinity. The decisions are related to color, camera angles, lenses, lighting, music, sets, and other things the art department touches. To fulfill this vision, there must be a collaboration with the department heads and key crew members.

The final decision belongs to the director and is filtered through his understanding of what will bring the characters to life while telling the story in a way that resonates with the audience and is easily understood.

Paint the Vision

Working with the cast and crew requires knowing the vision for the story better than anyone else. The director needs to be intimate with the story and motivate his team to execute his vision. This requires great listening skills and excellent communication.

Helping others to understand the vision is critical when getting 30 to 300 or more people in alignment. The director’s guidance needs to be clear, concise, and consistent. This will help ensure that the film is successful artistically and commercially.

Mastery Required to Win

The Best Director award typically goes to the director that demonstrates a mastery of the story, the writer’s intent, the key elements and beats of the story that are critical to its telling, has a style unique to the story, and knows how to help the cast and crew buy into that vision. The final film demonstrates these abilities with its cohesive and emotionally stirring story.

Copyright © 2023 by CJ Powers

The Remnant has Launched

There is a small group of “believers” who are pouring their lives into the secular marketplace. The impact of the group is growing, and while the general public are embracing their message of hope, others who defend the “Evangelical lifestyle” over all else are attacking the remnant.

Lauren Daigle has a clear vision to reach those “outside of the church walls.” Her recent appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Jimmy Fallon was well received by the general public, but those who are trying to keep the Evangelical lifestyle alive (I’ll refer to them as the ELAs) warned the “church” that her secular venues might lead her astray, causing Daigle to abandon her worship roots to become a secular artist.

The odd thing is that Daigle is a Contemporary Christian Artist through and through. Her latest album “Look Up Child” reached #3 on Billboards Top 200 because its message was universal and appealed to the masses. Unfortunately, Daigle’s performance on NBC received criticism on social media. Most argued that Daigle was wrong to appear on the show because Ellen is a lesbian.

Daigle responded to some of the criticism during an interview on WAY-FM Radio, “I think the second we start drawing lines around which people are able to be approached and which aren’t, we’ve already completely missed the heart of God.”

Jeremy Lynch appears to be another member of this up and coming remnant. His passion is making movies that reach the general public with messages of hope and love. Lynch is a Millennial filmmaker who got his start working crew for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. After getting his feet wet, he became an editor and worked on the visual effects for The Ryan Car Show. Most recently he wrote, directed, and produced his first short film The Scavenger, which can be seen on Amazon Prime Video. The Scavenger is a story of transformational love that changes a selfish man into a self-sacrificing man—a clear demonstration of unconditional love.

Lynch is not immune to ELA attacks, but has far less to worry about since his passion has always been focused on the general marketplace. Most ELAs have a penchant for going after those well established in the “Kingdom” because of what some call a “we/they” mentality. While the Bible directs Christians to “go” into the marketplace, ELAs believe Christians should “separate” themselves and create their own marketplace, which some see as a contradiction to the “Great Commission.”

While the argument about “separating from the world” versus “being in the world, but not of it” will continue to be argued for years to come, high profile people like Selena Gomez are taking advantage of this new uprising of the remnant.

Selena_GomezGomez has promoted Daigle’s album multiple times on social media to her 144.4 million followers. Daigle’s top three songs have been listened to by millions within the general public, creating one of the greatest witnessing tools of this past decade. Yet, the ELAs are more concerned that Daigle might create less worship songs, rather than rejoice in the millions who have heard her message of hope.

Unity within the church and the supporting of those who go into the marketplace must be revived for denominations to survive these changing times. The question is, will the ELAs empower this revival or will they become modern day Pharisees?

No matter what the outcome, millions will continue to be touched by the remnant.

Copyright © 2018 by CJ Powers