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Moodboard & Visual References

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Moodboard & Visual References

Visual Philosophy

The film should look like it is made of the same material as its subject. A memory-soaked house is not photographed with memory-soaked nostalgia — it is photographed with absolute clarity and attention. The discomfort is in the specificity, not in the effect.

Counter-intuitive principle: The more “normal” the house looks on screen, the more effective the film. Every visual reference that softens, romanticizes, or aestheticizes the house works against the film. The visual references we seek are films that look at difficult material with clear eyes.

Reference Films

Primary

A Ghost Story (2017) — David Lowery / DP: Andrew Droz Palermo

  • The house as continuous presence; time moving through a space
  • 1.33:1 with rounded corners — creates intimate enclosure
  • The ghost as a stationary witness to the house’s life after his death
  • What we take from it: how to let a space carry meaning without aestheticizing it

Moonlight (2016) — Barry Jenkins / DP: James Laxton

  • Black interiority — the specific quality of photographing Black emotional life with care and precision
  • The close face, the attentive camera, the resistance to the explanatory
  • Color as character — the specific palette of each chapter
  • What we take from it: how to be close without being invasive

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) — Céline Sciamma / DP: Claire Mathon

  • Two-person dynamics; the weight of looking and being seen
  • Light that comes from within the world (candles, the landscape)
  • Restraint as intimacy
  • What we take from it: how to shoot a relationship

Secondary

Saint Maud (2019) — Rose Glass / DP: Ben Fordesman

  • Ambiguity between interior experience and exterior reality
  • Light as psychological state
  • The specific quality of a house that holds a person’s pathology

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) — Lynne Ramsay / DP: Seamus McGarvey

  • Red as recurring visual motif embedded in the environment
  • Domestic space as site of horror without horror aesthetics
  • Editing that creates meaning through juxtaposition rather than narrative continuity

The Witch (2015) — Robert Eggers / DP: Jarin Blaschke

  • Natural light (overcast) as the primary visual register
  • The world at its most matter-of-fact, therefore most frightening
  • Slowness as accumulation

Color Palette

The House

Dominant: Warm amber to ochre — the color of wood and old fabric, not the color of comfort
Secondary: Deep shadow — the space under things, the corners that receive no light
Key accent: The specific gray-cool of the basement’s ground-level window light

ColorPurpose
Amber / OchreAccumulated life, warmth without ease
Shadow / Deep brownThe house’s pockets — presence without visibility
Ground-light cool grayThe basement’s specific signature

Staten Island Apartment

Dominant: Cooler whites and soft grays — the color of a space still being organized
Feeling: Cleaner, lighter, less absorbed

Transit

Dominant: Fluorescent blue-white (subway) and natural mixed (ferry)
Feeling: The outside world — neither warm nor threatening, simply real

Costume Direction

Kendrie: Soft textures, warm tones — clothes that suggest receptivity; nothing hard-edged or defensive
Charlize: More structured — cleaner lines; she organizes the world including what she wears
Alexis: Neither; she is between them — clothes that suggest long, specific choices
Melissa: The most settled; the clothes of a person at home in herself
Uncle: Clothes that suggest he is always ready to leave

Production Design Principles

  1. The house already has everything. Do not add design to the house. What is already there — furniture, objects, accumulated decoration — is the design. The art department’s job is to curate what is found, not to impose.

  2. The basement room is empty enough. Resist the impulse to add significant objects to the basement room. The room’s power is in its emptiness, in its ordinariness. Less.

  3. No horror design. No cobwebs, no peeling paint selected for atmosphere, no objects with inherent menace. Every design choice that signals “this is a horror space” should be cut.

  4. The apartment contrasts. The Staten Island apartment should have design that reads as controlled and current — Charlize’s influence — relative to the Bronx house’s accumulated generations.

Graph View