So I decided to rewatch Blood Blockade Battlefront-1 (mainly because I don't want to watch the remaining bad shows this season). I think it worked better for me the 2nd time. It's kinda fun analyzing Matsumoto's direction especially compared to how lacking the rest of the shows are this season. What makes a great director is how they convey information visually, not just through lines spoken by an actor. Some basic examples would be Takemoto using 1s for Chitanda's introduction in Hyouka, Aoki's storyboarding of the church sequence in episode 21 of Fate/Zero, and tons of stuff with Satoshi Kon. Now I'm certainly not saying that anything presented in this episode is of the caliber of the previous examples but Matsumoto definitely attempts to present as much information as possible. For example:
In this shot, the distance of the camera from the subject emphasizes the number of stairs the subject has climbed and needs to climb. The subject's slumped shoulders point out how tired the character is and how he's struggling to keep moving forward. There are also faces in the balls of light which contradict the body language of the main character, almost as if the faces are mocking him.
Or this bit, which shows the main character going into the underworld and that being symbolized by the lighting in that the character is literally walking into darkness. Also of note is how the background drawings use white but when they start walking further into darkness, the drawings use much more black and the animal images are slightly ominous. I should probably thank Kimura too.
Then there's this shot in which the use of a fisheye camera 'lens' slightly bends the environment around the villain. It draws the viewer's eye to the villain while also highlighting how egotistical the villain and his perspective in that everything revolves around him. There are numerous other examples sprinkled throughout the episode such as these two:
Both scenes use an outside visual element to present the information in some sort of interesting fashion. The first one for example not only again reinforces what Leonard is chasing but also highlights the scale of the monkey by orienting the camera around Leonard's height and the monkey being out of the frame. The 2nd one use the lightning bolts for emphasis so that the viewer knows what the VA is saying is important. It's minor stuff but it adds up to really give a sort of auteur flair to the work, missing in so many of its contemporaries.
Then there are the number of glorious transitions. Rewatching the episode, I caught even more match transitions and depth of focus transitions. The episode is just littered with them. The scene when the action stops and is signified with a blue filter, has the camera zoom through the crowd, which does a good job of showing how multilayered events are in the city. Instead of just having a separate cut with the robber, the zoom process also gives an indication of distance.
The episode also has Matsumoto using her own stuff to elevate things in the manga for example Klaus has an office full of plants in the manga but they're not full of roses or whatever (not a botanist). It makes the later scene after the flashback, with the petals flying everywhere, more visually interesting in addition to the match transition used for the flashback. Also the key secret elevator thing was out of Kyousougiga.