short films

We looked at some short films in class, the one that stood out to me and i decided to write about is called 'shelf life'

Shelf life shows a man undergoing a series of safety procedures before beginning to drill into his wall, a certificate that we see shows he is a health and safety officer and has been rewarded for his accomplishments.
Once the man begins to drill into the wall, we see another shot of an elderly man, his face drops and he falls as we notice his head has been penetrated by the safety mans drill. The credits roll and we see the man continuing to drill a series of holes. The film then ends.

The reason i chose to analyse this film is because of the unseen twist that happens towards the end, where the elderly man is killed. The twist really draws your attention into the film more, as it is very unexpected. What makes this so intriguing is the way the main character is set out to be very safety conscious, this leads us to believe he has taken every precaution and that the foreseeable events will run very smoothly, this is then completely changed as wee see the character accidentally kill a man, and not even know he has done it.
This adds a very comical yet cynical feel to the film and makes it very enjoyable to watch.

This short film is about mundane everyday things, and a lot of emphasis is shown on these simple everyday tasks, this links the short film to the one we were planning on making, as in the one we are planning on making would also emphasis everyday tasks that everyday people would undertake. Although in our short film it is going to give the viewer a view of the life of a standard person, with no twist, the short film we watched is still relevant for the fact of it being about everyday things.

Research into similar concepts

In this blog entry i will be looking into different texts which have similar themes to what we are thinking of using in our text. The first film we watched was city of god which is a Brazilian independent film and has a couple of transition that we are interested in as we want to create a number of similar shots and transition in our short film.

The first transition is of a teenager stood in a run down street, the grade of shot is very dull and blue which is showing that times are not very good. The camera then starts spinning anticlockwise around him as a Steadicam, there are sounds of a clock ticking in the background the shot speeds up and slows down then it fades into a shot of the character when he was younger. the grade has changed to warm oranges and yellows to represent that times are happier at that time in the past.

The next transition that's happens is still in the past will the warm yellows and oranges, the two main characters are walking along the street then a car drives along the road going the opposite way on the road in front of the camera then as the car exits the shot it has faded back to the future in the exact place as they were standing but they are in the future. the music this time is 70's music to emphasise the time period they are in. The grade is also back to the dull blues and greys.

The last transition we looked at was a different type of transition to the others we have looked at. Through out the whole scene the camera is still with an establishing shot of a room. For the rest of the scene it tells a story of what happened in the room. So different people come in the room different people fade in and out as the story goes along in different time periods, the scenery in the room changes constantly as well as the grade of the shot to dark colours to light and back to dark, and at the end it goes back to the original shot that happened at the start of the scene and carried on the story as usual.

All of the transitions that we have researched has helped us to gather ideas on what transitions we could use and by analysing them has helped us to work out how we can create them. We will now apply this in our planning and creation of our short film.