Fourth Movie!

The fourth movie that we watched was Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. We chose this movie because it is a different kind of fantasy then The Hobbit or Harry Potter. Instead of magic or fantasy creatures/species, this kind of fantasy is where characters have one sort of “peculiar” power. While this isn’t what our project is going for, we still want to be knowledgeable on the range of fantasy. This movie also has some time-travel elements to it. The travel is purely magical, though, no science involved so it cannot be considered science fiction.

To start off, the movie used lighting a lot, in many different ways. While this movie’s quality isn’t the best, they did have some good lighting. Everything in the main characters original timeline was desaturated, things were more grey and light. But when the main character went back in time, everything became much more saturated, almost over saturated. We assume this is to differentiate from the two different time periods, but it could also be showing how magical the place is. The costumes also aligned to the two different time periods, and the makeup as well. Miss Peregrine had more accented makeup to make her seem more bird-like. The villains wore typical villain suits, but whenever they appeared the lighting would get really dramatic, deepening the shadows. They also had white eyes, which could be makeup or editing.

Speaking of eyes, there were creatures, perhaps CGI or the like, who attacked people and took their eyes. The victims faces were indeed missing eyes, and it was most likely done with editing. More editing includes the powers of each character, the flames, the mouth in the back of the head, the bees, and the dream-watching. One of the characters powers was to bring dolls to life, which was animated with stop motion. Miss Peregrine had the power to turn back time, which she did every day to keep the children safe. The way this was executed was interestingly done. Besides the visuals of planes going forward and then backward, or the bomb dropped going back up, there was music that played forward, then backward. To show time 

reversing, the clock went backward and the song played backward. There was a lot of music used, sometimes subtle in the background, sometimes not. There were many sound bridges used. 

Some more editing includes when two characters dove down into the ocean, and one of them used her powers to blow air into a sunken ship so they could breathe. While this is wrong on so many levels, it was probably done with CGI and maybe green-screen.

Some things we liked/want to use from this movie is the lighting. We have an idea of two different, contrasting places, so the desaturation and saturation of the scenes is something we can use. Another thing we could keep in mind is the use of stop-motion/animation. Though we don’t have a specific place we think we would use it, it is still something to think about. Some things we didn’t like from this movie, or rather, cannot do from this movie is CGI. That seems to be a common theme.