ABSTRACT
Portrait photographers are keenly aware of this concept, and routinely use distorting focal lengths when they want to enhance or conceal physical features based on their subject’s facial characteristics. With the right combination of lighting choices and shooting angles, even wildly distorting focal lengths can make characters look likeable, comical, attractive, and anything in between, as required by the story. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s romantic comedy Amelie, the story of Amélie Poulain, an eccentric young Parisian girl who one day decides to surreptitiously involve herself in the lives of friends and strangers in her neighborhood, illustrates the use of overt distortion to establish the general tone of a narrative. The careful attention paid to every aspect of Amélie’s art direction, lighting, blocking, make-up, and costume design also extended to their lens selection, which involved director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel assigning specific focal lengths to actors after considering their unique facial characteristics.
