Bridesmaids in a Wes Anderson lens!

Posted by Kaamil Jones in Reel Reading · Giknis · B Band on

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We started with one of our favorite romantic comedies, Bridesmaids, and decided to change the genre to the style of Wes Anderson’s directing. The scene we chose was during one of the main character’s bridal shower where they begin by sitting and watching Lillian open her presents. From here, the scene escalates because her best friend, Annie, can no longer hold in her anger about Helen, another bridesmaid, trying to steal Lillian from her. This scene is done well by the setting, props, facial expressions, tone, and pace. Wes Anderson has a very different style of comedy, so there were many areas we were able to change.

Firstly, we researched Anderson’s style which involves scenes that are filmed using a wide shot and they are also always symmetrical which plays to his aesthetics. Our redone scenes were from a distance to make it more of a wide shot, and we kept the people centered and mostly symmetrical while filming at eye level, another tool he uses. Anderson is also known for higher saturated scenes, so we used backgrounds that were bright and high in color. In one section, we have a bright blue background to demonstrate how Anderson uses such bright, pastel coloring. We also filmed in front of windows to get a natural and bright lighting, again similar to his directing style.

Secondly, we decided to change a lot of our scenes to the style we believe Wes Anderson would do. One change that we made was to add a lot of cuts. The original scene in bridesmaids had very few cuts and more tracking shots, and when we filmed we decided that we were going to cut almost all of our talking shots, this way it would be more dramatic and show Anderson’s comedic style by switching back and forth to props and people. We also changed one of the characters to be male. In Wes Anderson films most of the characters are men, and he is even noted to only use women as tools for the lead male characters. Bridesmaids is an entirely female centered movie, so obviously we didn’t want to take this away but it added another layer by having a male play a lead female character. Kaamil’s character Annie is originally played by  Kristen Wiig , the film is also surrounded by Annie’s character so we thought it would be in Wes Anderson fashion to make the main character a man. We made things seem a little more fake in our redone scene as well. Wes Anderson films make some things seem very over the top and ridiculous based on the background and props, so we changed the big cookie in the original film to a bag of cookies and the chocolate fountain in the film to a carton of school milk. Wes Anderson is also known to have things in his films that are really weird and catches people off guard. We decided to change the dog in the original film to a human with a leash which is really strange but funny, again reflecting Anderson’s unique directing style.
The final things that we changed was the speed of dialogue. In the original film Annie talks really fast but we decided to have Annies character slow down which added to the comedy because of the ridiculous things she says, so the audience can catch is more easily. The pace of Anderson films tends to be very slow, even though a lot is going on. Overall, we were able to change many aspects of the original Bridesmaids scene to reflect Wes Anderson’s directing genre where we were able to analyze each component of the original movie and relate it to Anderson.

 Video Here!

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