Someone that people don’t know too
well but have definitely heard his name is Ridley Scott. He is a great director
and producer in Hollywood who has brought many stories to life such as Alien,
Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, and American Gangster, and many
more.
Who do you know that can bring a
story of an Alien that is killing people on a space ship down to Earth in to
our theatres so that we can experience the true terror the characters feel? Who
else has the ability to bring the epic of a hero that would have fought 2000
years ago right to our bedroom televisions? Who else has the talent to take us
living in 2015 to giving us a front row seat of the hardships of a drug
smuggling gangster in the late 1960s? Scott has done all of that, and brought
millions of people many other great lives and stories that have allowed us to
step away from our own worlds to take a peek in to another.
Ridley Scott is not the greatest
director of all time, but he is up there as one of the best visual ones. When
he was making his best films, so were Steven Spielburg, George Lucas, Martin
Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola. Scott had a lot of competition between the
1970s and early 2000s with these other directors. Although they were tough
competition, the fact that Scott could still be recognized out of the bunch is
incredible.
Scott’s style, which did set him
apart from other artists in his industry, focused greatly on the visuals of
science fiction, older crimes, and historical fiction. To get technical, his production
design in all of his movies are so specific and at the same time, massive which
is how Scott was so easily able to bring these worlds to live and put us in
them through the theater screen. The way he has the camera move or not move
adds another great element to his craft as a visual director. He tends to
always have the camera moving., usually in a smooth motion. He rarely does hand
held camera movement to keep it more unique and fitting for the shots and
specific intense moments. His main purpose to keeping the camera moving is to
keep up the life like pace so we as the audience are thrown in to the motion of
the world rather then being a perfect, still viewer.
The last exciting thing I have to
say about Scott is…that he’s still directing and producing! He’s 77 years old,
and in the middle of producing quite a few projects at this moment in
Hollywood. With him being in the same industry I aspire to be apart of, he is a
great icon and role model to look up to with maintaining his creative touch in
such a money focused and controlled industry.
