Chess Film: Color Symbolism

 In our film, we wanted to use the 'good is light' and 'dark is bad' metaphor to show the contrasting characters. These colors are used since the opening of our film, showing our killer. 

Opening shot

   

In the opening shot of our film, we intentionally had our killer wear brown in order to match the darker color chess piece, which his character symbolizes. Usually in film, the antagonist mainly wear dark colors like black, but since my chess board is brown and white instead of black and white, we decided wearing dark brown made more sense. This brown further connects the murderer to the game of chess. 

First shot where investigator is revealed

In this shot, the investigator role is established by him reading over the evidence of the murder which recently occurred. We told our actor to wear light colors, and he dressed accordingly. Although, I imagined the investigator to wear pure white, but I didn't communicate that clearly with my group. The color white is used to symbolize purity and innocence, which implies that our investigator is an innocent character throughout the film.

Murder shot

In this shot, the highly contrasting colors are heavily noticeable. This is shown by having the characters so close together in the shot. At first, the shot seems a bit eerie with our murderer standing behind the investigator who is unknown of anyone around. Then, our murderer pulls out a chess piece from his pocket which help viewers connect the dots that the investigator is about to be murdered. No frontality is shown in this scene in order to keep the murders identity a 'secret' although it can be solved very quickly.

Closing shot

The closing shot of our film shows both the chess piece and finally reveals the killers face. My idea as cinematographer was to have the chess piece mirror our actor. This is shown by matching the color of the piece to the color of the clothing worn by our actor. We also left the queen piece as the only one standing, with all the light colored chess pieces knocked down. This symbolizes all the killings done by the murderer; even the ones not shown.