If Gone Girl was a Wes Anderson Film

In order to convert “Gone Girl” into a Wes Anderson film we had to change a lot of the cinematic  and theatrical elements of the film. We chose to do this by creating a storyboard of the scene where Amy returns home as we felt that it was one of the most powerful scenes in the film. In order for the scene to truly be recreated in Wes Anderson fashion we had to change the color palette. The palette used in “Gone Girl” is a Fincher’s palette which is a lot of blues and yellows in order to set the dreary mood of the film. Wes Anderson uses a pastel color palette and bold colors  in most of his films. So we used reds, pinks, lighter blues and other colors that we felt fit with Wes Anderson’s style.

At the beginning of the scene we get a shot of Nick on the couch looking confused about the commotion occuring outside . Nick is in the first two thirds of frame and we get a side profile shot of him. One trademark in Wes Anderson films is his use of symmetry in his shots, so we decided to have Nick look directly at the camera and make him centered. This allowed us to have Nick be completely symmetrical in the frame. We also changed the couch color and background, as the couch was dull yellow. We wanted the couch to stand out so we changed the colors of the couch to red and blue. We also drew a window behind Nick in order to continue with the symmetry of the shot.

Wes Anderson uses an array of different shots in his films as well, with some of his favorites being medium and close up shots. He uses medium shots to establish the setting of his scenes and uses close ups to convey an emotion of a character. The part with the most emotion in the scene we chose, is when Amy gets out the car wearing a white dress covered in blood and pretends to cry. So we recreated that frame by doing a close up of Amy as she is staring at Nick. Wes Anderson also utilizes transition slides in Films that has Bold lettering. We created our own transition slide where we wrote AMY in bold font and colored it in red, we the slide to transition from a close up of Amy falling into Nick’s arms to a wide shot of Amy in Nick’s arms.

Overall converting a scene from “Gone Girl” to Wes Anderson’s style was not as difficult as we thought it would be. Since “Gone Girl” is a  thriller with a complex storyline and Wes Anderson’s style is more catered to adventure/comedy films. We wanted to keep the general storyline of the film and change more of the cinematic features of “Gone Girl”. Wes Anderson usually sticks to the same trends when it comes to the plots of his films. Where everything ends well for the characters in the film unlike in “Gone Girl” as the movie ends on a bad note.