Tim Burton study

Tim Burton 

I really like the way that Tim Burton uses lighting in his movies, its always so dark and low level, it makes everything look so much more serious and dark. I intend to make my opening sequence, serious and dark, so i will try to use some of Tim Burtons techniques

Burton uses high level lighting to represent fantasy and joy, and he uses low level lighting to represent the reality of life, pain and suffering. He uses various angles to show a characters power, or weakness.
Colour is a huge element, which is enhanced, and created by light, lights and colours add to the films symbolism  for example, gloomy shades represent a lack of sincerity, and bright vibrant colours represent cheer and optimism.He shoots subjects in oversaturated and undersaturated colour, often in order to use the colour of the scene to help add to the Gothic mystery or surreal and dreamlike states that his stories portray. He does use digital colorization to help enhance the colours, like in charlie and the chocolate factory, but Burton still likes to use the camera to capture his colours. Tim Burton also mixes his lighting up, for example in corpse bride, there are two worlds, the world of the living and the world of the dead. The world of the living is total low level darkness, very muted colours, every thing is grey and dull. This is to represent to poiniency and the struggle of life, but the land of the living is in total high level lighting, everything very colourful and vibrant, because if your dead, you dont have to worry about money or anything, because nothing worse can happen to you, and you feel no pain.

This picture shows the contrast in lighting of corpse bride.

The dutch angle or dutch tilt is a film technique that appears in many of Burton's films. He uses it much more frequently than other filmmakers. The shot involves tilting the camera when shooting a frame in order to create a skewed sense of tension. In the resultant shot, the horizon of the shot will be on an angle rather than on a horizontal plane. He uses the technique in both his live-action and stop-motion camerawork.

This is an example of the dutch tilt, i personally love this angle, and i will definitely use it in my opening sequence.