American Beauty Screenshots

I'll be doing my project taking intimate portrait shots in the cinematographic style of American Beauty. Throughout the movie there are portrait shots focusing on a specific character's face in tight frame, either with a dark background or with something emotive blurred out. Besides this, there are several shots focusing on body parts close up, illustrating sexuality and beauty. I plan to capture a combination of these two types of shots using the color red and roses which are a consistent visual theme throughout the movie

Studio Set-up vs. Found Pictures

Why would these images score higher on the AP rubric than images found in nature?

These images would score higher on the AP rubric due to the intentional nature of the photographs verses the "found" nature of photographs that are not staged. Beyond this, the work indicates multiple insights that are artificial as well as natural, and would therefore score higher on the AP rubric (6.D). The studio setting also means that in each successful pictures the materials must have been used successfully to express the artist's ideas (6.F) and that almost every picture will be created from the artist's original vision and ideas (6.B). The studio setting all but eliminates the possibility of near identical pictures of the same "found" scene in nature, because each picture is created from scratch. Finally, this setting forced a true investigation of aesthetics and ideas to solve design problems with the materials we possessed, some students spending an entire class period adjusting their set-up before beginning to photograph (6.A, 6.C). I concur that the photos from this project would achieve higher scores on the AP rubric than pictures found in nature. 

-Oelky