Sleepy Hollow
...feeling to the film. The film also used excellent camera work which helped to capture the audience’s attention and to tell the story. The mise en scene used from the beginning of the film till the end helped to reinforce the mood of the film. The filmmaker was able to keep the audience engaged with the various camera shots and was able to create an effective dramatic mood by using dark colors with splashes of white, red and other bold colors. The audience was able to focus on the characters and the story by the way the camera was used throughout the film.
The film Sleepy Hollow desaturated the color to enhance and create a mood for the film, which immediately felt oppressive and created a feeling of tension. In the film, the town of Sleepy Hollow is shown as dark and gloomy and cheerless. The fall colors of the trees and the landscape are shown in a cool gray color. It represented the people that were living there and how they felt with the events that were going on in their town. Even the clothing that is worn by many of the town people was dark and oppressive, except for the Van Tassel family, who wore elegant and refined clothing. Especially eye-catching was the clothing that was worn by Katrina Van Tassel which was bright colors perhaps symbolizing her youthful vibrancy and perhaps innocence that was not noted anywhere else in the town of Sleepy Hollow. “By using bright or saturated colors on the object of greatest interest and placing that object against a contrasting background, the director can easily capture the viewer’s eye.” (Boggs 229) Occasionally, when Ichabod Crane was dreaming, all the colors became bright, and vivid. The audience could see the bright blue of his mother’s dress and the sky, as well as the color of the flowers. This helped with the memory flashbacks that were occurring with Ichabod. Beyond those occurrences of color,...
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