Signs

Signs is a very popular short film which Patrick Hughes directed in 2008. It is a 2009 Cannes Lions winner and was created as part of the Schweppes Short Film Festival as the drink is product placement within the short. However it is not done in a way that is distracting, and serves a purpose within the narrative if it is even noticed at all.

This short film starts with setting up the status quo in Jason’s life, his regular repetitive routine of getting up and going to work and how he is so introverted he cannot connect to people and fails to understand the office jokes. This of course drastically changes when he starts communicating to the girl in office in the next building via short, hand written signs. Stacey is particularly exaggerated in her movements during these exchanges which helps convey her personality as more extroverted than Jason’s.

I feel that this works well as a classic romantic film as well as a more modernized one. The difference being the hand signs would be text messages or internet posts. Now that technology is more wide spread people are communicating in new and different ways without ever actually having to have meet in person first. That being said I find the use of hand written signs to be a nice nod to older fashioned love letters. It is a very smooth blending of old and new communication forms.

Additionally with the Schweppes placement it also makes a good study in affective economic or emotive branding. The company wants to sell its product, but lots of drink are very similar, so Schweppes is reaching beyond that and selling the idea that it is a drink for people in relationships or that if you drink Schweppes it will be easier for you to find relationships. They are not selling their product anymore: they are selling and idea. The product is only seen on Stacey’s desk and later in the film when Jason drinks it at lunch, this shows that the characters are connecting with each others interests and literal tastes even through they have never meet in a regular conversation. This creates the idea that sharing a brand identity when you are a consumer helps to strengthen your relationship with other consumers.

This short film can be watched below and on the Schweppes film site:

A Thousand Words

A Thousand Words is a short film which was directed by Ted Chung in 2008. It was featured as a Vimeo Official Festival Selection as well as a part of Pangea Day Films.

A Thousand Words is a short film about a man who finds a woman’s camera on a bus and uses the pictures inside of it to get it back to her. This short film was shot in black and white and tt has no spoken dialogue.

Additionally there is no really background audio track either, all of the audio in the first half is natural sounds like the camera clicking. After the man figured out that Nasim is not going to be on the train and coming back for her camera the background music, light as it is, picks up as the man goes biking down the highway looking for the building in her pictures. The sound is cut that way as to connect the audience to the adrenaline the character is feeling having gone from a normal pace of life into a more determined, worried panic that the camera has to get back to her, and soon.

This type of music plays very well off of the black and white color, which as it is a deliberate choice in modern film making, indicates a level of emotional nostalgia. If this was television shows it would be a kind of affective economics. This film has a kind of mystical air about it from the music and the coloring, but the pacing is key as well as if any of the scenes occurred too fast than the audience would not be able to feed into the emotion of the piece without feeling forced into it. Being that the first half of the short is the man’s acquiring and messing around with the camera, it also pushes that emotional rush since time is literally running out on the film tape.

This short film can be watched below:

Card Party

Card Party / Partie de Cartes is a 1987 short film directed by Leopoldo Fregoli. There is an extremely similar film with near the exact same title done up by Louis Lumiere, making finding much information about this particular short film very difficult.

It is similar to Lumiere’s style, as it depicts an everyday event, however it is also different than the Lumiere’s traditional work because it brings the audience closer to just a few people rather than showing a whole scene with many people in a crowd. I like the placement of the camera for this short film, it is the point of view of who the fourth player would be sitting where the camera was, but it does not feel invasive as there is not anyone actually sitting there, so it is suppose to make the audience think they are participating in the game as well. The camera in this film is much closer to the table than the camera in the Lumiere version, making this feat possible here, but not necessarily in Lumiere’s as their version feels more like you are just watching rather than part of the group and playing along.

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat / L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat is a very short film composed of one stationary single shot of about fifty seconds, and was directed by the Lumiere brothers in 1985 – making this one of the classic beginnings of cinema.

The urban myth surrounding this film – that it made audiences run from the theaters in fear of being hit by the train – has even landed it on Time’s top list of horror films (view here).

Ion Martea of Culture Wars writes here that:

“The key to the Lumières’ success lies in frame composition. A perpendicular shot would have been impossible at the time (unless the camera operator had been suicidal), while a parallel one would have stopped at reproducing motion, with little effect over the audience. The emergence of the train on a diagonal line, however, both provided a sensation of identifying with the point of view of the travelers at La Ciotat, and created the illusion of a real vehicle, growing in size, making its grand entrance into the lives of the spectators. Therefore, audiences were not engaged as passive voyeurs, but were invited to join in the excitement actively, reacting passionately, experiencing something totally new.”

I think this short film is well worth the less than a minute it takes to view, if only for looking at the various hats the people are wearing as they walk by.

Alice in Wonderland

This version of Alice in Wonderland is the silent short film from 1903, which was directed by Cecil Hepeorth and Percy Stow. It was the original movie version of the Lewis Carol book of the same name and was partially restored by the BFI in 2010, however some parts are still lost.

Due to the rather damaged nature of parts of this film, it can be a bit awkward to watch at parts. For example there is a bit that lasts only a few seconds, with title card and all, where Alice goes to play with a dog (which I do not recall being in the books, though there was a bit about a mouse) and then it cuts to the White Rabbit’s house. The most together scenes appear to be the “down the rabbit hole” bit with the door and the drinks and cake as well as the card procession at the end, the tea party bit is undamaged compared to the rest of it but yet feels too short.

However, I will say it does appear to be attempting to stay true to there story of Alice in Wonderland, rather than mixing that with its second part Through the Looking Glass (ie Jabberwocky, Tweedledee / Tweedledumb, the Walrus and the Carpenter stories) as many movies are apt to do, as this included the bit where the Duchess’ baby turns into a pig, which many other versions would leave out.

It it hard to say much critically about this film as much of it is miss or damaged, but it is a nice short film to watch if one happens to like Alice in Wonderland as it is the first cinematic attempt to reproduce the story, which it still manages to do well enough for the audience to understand it even though parts are missing. Which is a real testament to the power of the story itself.

Doodlebug

Doodlebug is a black and white short film which was directed by Christopher Nolan in 1997. Doodlebug is his third short film after Tarantella (1989) and Larceny (1996). This short film actually reminded me of Citizen Kane, or at least the bit with all the mirrors. It is also a bit like the Seuss book Horton Hears a Who as it involves much smaller things being endangered by much larger things.

The perspective of this is from what appears to me a regular man, and then there is the smaller man he squishes and the larger man that squishes him. So the audience can never really be sure of where they are in the placement of the scale in terms of size, because the audience is made to think the first man is the human-sized one, but the other two look exactly like him so one cannot be sure.

This short film in that regard it like colonization, the countries that think they are so much larger and better than the others go and squish the littler countries – but empires never last. Which goes back to the size of the character, empires start out small, and then get much larger, but then one tiny thing can drive the whole of the empire apart again. They just get replaced by new powers it is a cycle that is also like the cycle of life, people start out small get bigger and think they can do whatever they want but there is always someone bigger and better than can come along and derail / squish you. As such this is also about karma and Buddhism, as when you harm something that harm will come back to you later on as the life value of all things is considered equal.

The Burglar’s Dilemma

The Burglar’s Dilemma is a 1912 drama film directed by D. W. Griffith.

Ok, I’m just going to bring it up now, so I can say it and get it out of the way because it annoyed me the whole way through this short film. There is a seam in the walls / sets / outside the house in almost every scene. This seam is kind of to the right of the middle. In the beginning it acts as a kind of visual divider between the brother’s but it’s everywhere, and it distracts me. It’s nearly always in the same place, so I figure the sets are on back of each other and it is meant as like a framing / camera alignment focus point, but you guys know me and my line’s, so clearly this is really annoying to me.

Fun thing about the costumes of the girl’s – the two in the front are wearing white so that they stick out from the darker background, but the third girl is wearing black and is generally between or behind the other girls so that you can see her / see contrasts with the other girls as well. Also, her black dress is shiny down the sides, which helps.

4:16, oh hi there wall seam. I hate you. But I love the fact that your chair-rail across your middle is slanted a bit higher on the left (or maybe the camera is), because that puts the boy in a frame-with-in-a-frame, between the rail and the seam, he’s got his own box there on the lower left. It’s like the environment is saying “Hey this kid? Watch, he gets important.” It’s making a point of emphasizing when sound or dialogue would not have been reliable.

5:48, ok I’m not really sure how realistic that throw-down was considering it was the smaller brother that did that. And the “fight” bit just didn’t seem long enough to warrant such a violent reaction anyway. I mean the movie text even calls him “the weakling” – but really, I don’t think the little either of the brothers drank was enough to get anybody drunk in the first place. And the brother can’t really be drunk, because he’s aware enough to check his brother’s vital signs. Maybe not read them correctly, but at least check them.

6:53, I really like the music here. Just saying, it’s crescendo-ing to make the scene more dramatic as the brother freaks out and the Bulgar kid has to get into the house. Plus I appreciate the use of violins.

8:05, ok kid how blind are you in that room not to notice a body on the floor? Especially when the characters didn’t seem to need a light in there a few minutes ago like you seem to now. And look the “drunk” brother is running off the find help to blame the whole thing on the kid. Thus, we have the invention of the drama film. But really I do think it is the music that helps make this what it is, watching it on silent isn’t nearly as entertaining or suspenseful. The music helps add a certain tone, and urgency or drama to a particular scene or situation which helps to break the action up because so much of it takes place within that one room of the house.

9:37, and you thought climbing on a bookcase would help hid you how? At least under the table would have made some sense, you could make a jump at their legs when the entered to room, and then tried to escape.

11:45, I think we have here “good cop’ on the right being nice to the boy and letting him explain himself and grasp his shoulders, and “bad cop” and the left yelling at and shaking the kid up. I also think that the guy on the right also has a slightly lighter color suit on, which also helps to make that duality distinction. And of course the brother that’s awake is the one wearing the darkest clothing, because he’s the antagonist / catalyst that caused the action to start snowballing into a big deal and getting the kid caught up in something more than he bargained for. And the medical dude is wearing white, because he’s the medical dude that wakes the first brother up and saves the day for the kid.

Film Can Be Found For Viewing Here:

Exiting the Factory

Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory / Exiting the Factory is a 1895 French black & white documentary short film directed and produced by Louis Lumière.

This film is a quick 0:45 seconds. And of course, I love the way the shot is framed. The door is off-center, meaning the people have to walk over through the space in one constant direction, right to left (otherwise they’re not in the shot) and this helps to make the group of people look more numerous than the might otherwise be. Also, I love how the dog inserts himself into the scene as the first bicycle kid comes out and runs off with him, that is my favorite part. It really humanizes the whole of the short, makes the people feel real. The second bicycle kid is also visually interesting because he comes out, goes to the left a bit than crosses the frame to exit off the right, only he does this in more of a circle because of the bike, and it’s just very graceful. Also, keeps the viewer interested as it breaks up the scene from all the women in those long skirts. Same idea applies for the third guy on a bicycle, only his dog darts across the frame right to left after him.

Film Can Be Found Here for Viewing: