Babette's Feast, Ida, and Atonement

For this project, I wrote an essay for my "Introduction to Global Film" class. The task was to compare and contrast two films we watched in class based on a chosen theme. We could pick from a list of themes and pair any two movies from the course. I went with the theme of atonement and selected the films Babette's Feast (1987) and Ida (2013) because they both heavily involve religion in their plots and themes, albeit in different ways.

I'm using this essay in my multimodal project because it allows me to include scenes from each movie as evidence. When I write about films for classes, I always wish I could show the scenes I'm talking about to make my points clearer. This project gives me the chance to do just that. I also want to make the design more interesting, moving away from a simple essay structure where everything just scrolls down. However, after some experimentation, I decided the single column scroll fit the flow of the writing and the clips the best. As you can see, this page is a grid to try and have some variety throughout the pages.

I had some trouble figuring out the color scheme for this project. Ida (2013) is filmed in black and white, and Babette's Feast (1987), while having a gorgeuous color scheme of a movie, didn't pan out well when I tried to incorperate some of the color elements in my site. In the endI chose to keep a clean color scheme by keeping with a mainly grayscale page. The splashes of color were inspired by the colors on Lorens' uniform from Babette's Feast. This keeps the pages from being too plain as a grayscale, and it makes the colors a little less of a shock as the user scrolls down the page.

The header is the part of the project that I am the most proud of. It took a lot of trial and error to get the image I had in my brain right. The screenshot from Ida felt like a perfect addition to the context of this essay. However, I did also have some trouble with the intial size of the image. This has been circumvented by the background when the viewport is greator than 800 pixels. I am very happy with how the gradient looks. I am also very happy with my Works Cited page and the relevant links.