Cinematic points of view on the film Stand By Me

          Cinematic points of view on the film Stand By Me.

  When watching the film stand by me, I realized many aspects of cinema through out the film. The points I would like to talk about are the following; the use of camera angles, costumes, lighting, and special effects.

  I noticed a lot of good use in the camera angle opportunities in this film. I found that when there was a switch to a different scene, they would choose an angle that could really make you feel like you were in the movie. At times, they would put the camera in front of the characters as they were walking along the train tracks and I thought that was a good choice for the director. I think that when they added that touch, you could really see the whole scene and everything that was going on. At other times, Robert Reiner (the director) would take the chance to do a scene from the characters point of view. This was very interesting to me, because I did feel like I was on the train tracks looking for Ray Brower along with them. This movie was defiantly about an adventure, and if you were not deeply engaged with it, you would get bored very easily because it would seem as just a movie where boys are walking along rail -road tracks looking for a body they may or may not discover.  In reality, them walking along is the whole movie. This is why camera angles were so important to make you feel like you were there.

   The costumes in this movie I thought were high budget and prominent. I think that Robert Reiner did a phenomenal job on suiting the characters to their clothes. As soon as a new character walked in the frame, I could tell what kind of person they would turn out to be, just by looking at what they were wearing. For example, Robert Reiner could spend a lot on the original costumes of the group of boys. He could do this because they really only had to wear one outfit for majority of the film. If I had read the book before I saw the movie, I would have pictured the boys in the same outfits as they were wearing in the movie.

 I noticed that the director used a lot of lighting techniques that caught my eye. I am going to talk about one scene in particular for this theory. In the scene where they were having an overnight camp -fire, each boy had to stay awake and guard the site. When each one was hiding behind the tree on the look out, they had one side of their face lit up, and the other was in shadows.  I thought that this symbolized one side of the boys being scared (the shadowed side). The shadowed side also showed that a lot of them do have a dark side to their personalities. The other side of their faces was lit up. The first thing that came to mind when I noticed this was, they were very vulnerable at the moment they were guarding. I really thought that this scene added a great amount of description about each boy’s personality to the film Stand By Me.

  The use of special effects was striking during the action scenes, such as running away from the train. When I was watching it, I was thinking about how hard it would be to get a train and chase the boys at perfect timing. I’m not sure if green screens were around at this time, but even if they were this part of the movie was impressing. I thought that getting the camera around at the right times to capture every second of exhilarating action was incredible. Other parts in the movie that used great special effects were every time a gun fired. The crew would have to make an explosion every time that a gun was fired, and it would have to be at the right time, every time. I think the film could have used a bit more action, or suspense, but each time that they did, I thought it was ample.