Simple and Short

This past week we have been watching a collection of short films. In a couple of months we will be shooting our own shirt film so it is important that we look at other shorts. We had a DVD from the BFI of a collection of shorts , with a variety of different genres. Our short films have to be silent so we have to look for:

• Narrative
• Movement
• Editing
• Mise-en-scene
• Plot Points
• Soundtrack
  

The majority of shorts used minimum dialogue , which meant that the narrative had to be good enough to keep the audience interested. All of the shorts accomplished this with different techniques and each a different number of plot points. The number of plot points are important as you don't want to many , but you need enough to make the narrative interesting. Hard Labour was the first short we watched. I believed the narrative to be interesting , balanced and included a good twist. The main negative that the group picked up on was that there was too many plot points, and the final plot point ruined the short to an extent. Although we also thought that the idea was so simple that it worked , this along with exciting and interesting shots meant that you didn't want to take your eyes of it. The next short we watched was Stripes , a very hard hitting drama. With Stripes it was shot very well , but there wasn't enough variety with the shots. The narrative was again simple and didn't include many plot points, but this was ok as the plot points that where used let you interested. The movement of the characters as well created this contrast that helped you define who was the antagonist and protagonist. Dialogue was used but from the point of view of someone who was taking notes on narrative , it wasn't the main convention. Last of all we saw Hard Hitting, which was a comedy. I believed this to be the best out of the shorts as it used NO dialogue and was only about 5 minutes long, which was good as we could compare our ideas to it. The main convention for this short was the editing which dominated most of the film. The idea was simple , boy meets girl story with a funny twist. The variety of shots used meant you was not looking at the same thing for more then a few seconds. And more importantly the soundtrack ( fast rock music) matched the action , keeping that comedic sense.