Arrival Review

Arrival is a short film made in 2016 and was directed by Daniel Montanarini. In this film, a woman sits in a café, thinking about how she is pregnant and what she is going to do with the baby. She is anticipating meeting the father. The film is a dramatic monologue, and we hear the thoughts in the woman's head as a voice over from the action we are seeing on the screen. As she thinks about the anticipated meeting, the thoughts she has seem to get more and more worried, building tension for an audience member as well. We are also given more and more fragments of information about the situation as the film goes on, in order to piece together the bigger picture by the end of the film.


In terms of micro elements used, the camera stays in one fixed position throughout the majority of the film, zooming in and out on the woman. This creates a view for the audience that seems to be more like a play, since there is a lack of editing and we are seeing the story play out from one fixed position, and the single camera angle being a wide shot and not really moving. The sound is mainly diegetic, because you can hear the noise of the café at the start, but then her voice over comes in over the top. The sound of a train disrupts the peace of the café and represents how the woman is really feeling in her own head. The sound then goes completely silent after the train, and we only hear the voice over and not the café sounds. This shows how the character has a moment of clarity about what she is going to do.


I enjoyed this films use of sound to represent the characters' emotions, but I didn't really enjoy the monologue style of it. I don't think I will be using that sort of style in my own work, but I liked the idea of it being in one single location, since this gives the idea of the film more simplicity.

Operator review

Operator is a short film made in 2015 and is directed by Caroline Bartleet. The narrative is about a phone operator who is talking to a woman who is struggling in a house fire, and the operator is trying to calm her down and talk her through the steps she needs to take to stay safe. She has to be very calm and collected, as the woman on the other end of the line is panicking.

The film works very well with being short in length, since we as viewers dive into the narrative and there is a sudden stop to it with a cliff-hanger. Both of these things build the tension for an audience. It also gets the audience emotionally invested in the story very quickly and just getting that small snippet makes you feel like you understand what the operator has to go through on a daily basis. It builds intensity and creates suspense.

The micro elements used are extremely effective, especially in terms of sound. The sound we can hear is everything the operator can hear on the other end of the phone, which draws us into the bubble of her world and what she's trying to process and help fix. Since we can't see the woman on the other end of the line, just the operator on the phone, the sound does an extremely good job of making an audience believe that the fire is really happening and the woman is really in danger. It also paints a picture in the audiences mind of what is happening. Both actors performances also help this - the woman in the fire is clearly very panicked, and as the operator is getting a picture of what is happening, so is the audience. The sound then cuts out completely as soon as the line goes dead at the end of the call and we know that the woman is safe. The operator seems to be slightly shaken and relieved, and that is the same way the audience feels. However, she manages to continue her job as the next phone call comes in and stays professional.

This film represents gender in a certain way as well, using two women as the main characters. The operator, in contrary to stereotypical female characters, manages to stay collected and professional throughout the whole ordeal, trying to help the woman as much as she possibly can. The woman in the fire seems to be a single mother, since there is no indication of a man being in the house, and manages to rescue her son and save herself from the flames, showing bravery. It also shows a sense of relatability between the two characters being female, especially since the operator might have ha a child herself.

I really liked the suspense in this film and found it to be very dramatic - this was mainly due to the micro elements being used extremely efficiently, especially the use of sound. I would probably like to have some sort of intensity in my own film, and may think about how to use sound to achieve this.

Tight Jeans Review

Tight Jeans is a short film made in 2008 and was directed by Destiny Ekharaga. It is set in one location - a busy street in London, establishing the location. Three guys are sitting on a wall, waiting for someone and they see someone else walking past with tight jeans on. They then have a comical conversation about why black men can't wear tight jeans. There is a cyclical ending, because a the end another person walks past wearing a tight T-shirt, and one of the guys begins talking about the same topic again.

The film is extremely dialogue heavy/focused and wouldn't have work as well if the dialogue didn't sound quite realistic, and as though a group of friends could actually be having that conversation. The other micro elements aren't as noticeable because of how dialogue focused it is, but they are still important. The camera doesn't use many varied shots, mainly just shots of the three of them sitting on the wall, moving around slightly and sometimes cutting to close ups of their faces. The editing is also continuity editing, because as the director seems to be trying to make it seem as realistic as possible, she would want the editing to go unnoticed.

I do like the style of the film being dialogue heavy, because there is a strong focus on the script and the writing of the characters. I also like how it was just focused in one location, since it was simple but effective for the film they were making. I might use both of these elements in my own work, but maybe add slightly more action.

Echo Review

Echo was a short film made in 2011 and directed by Lewis Arnold. In this film a girl pretends to get phone calls saying that her dad has been in an accident, and keeps conning people in the street into believing this story. In the opening wide shot, we are introduced to a scene in a busy street and we hear the sound of an ambient crowd, creating an objective feeling. We aren't actually even aware at first of who our main protagonist is going to be, and it feels as though we ourselves as audience members are the people in the street watching the scene play out. For a lot of the call at the start, we see just one shot playing out. The actors' performance was so convincing that because for a lot of it the camera was hidden, normal people in the street came up to her to see if she was alright. There is quite a restricted colour palette, which remains throughout the film, with lots of grey tones.

By the second phone call we see of this girl, we have been given more information, and now know that it is a con and that her dad isn't actually in the hospital. However, we don't know why she is doing it, whether it is for money or another reason. We see this call from the perspective of the younger brother, who is as in the dark as the audience about what she is doing. Since the first call, we've been introduced to the girls' mum and brother, and have discovered that she is very distant from them, and is quite moody from home. We are shown how isolated she feels by seeing shots of her smoking outside her house, and sitting alone in a café.

Between the second call and the last call we get given more information about the girls' family, and find that her dad was actually in an accident and was killed by getting knocked off his bike. This makes what she is doing more impactful for an audience member, since we know that this has happened for real in the past, and she is forcing herself to relive it for some reason; maybe as part of her grieving process or maybe as a form of emotional self harm. In this sequence, the editing is much more fast paced with lots of quick shots, and the camera uses lots of close ups to show the raw emotion on the girls face. They did this to show how even though it isn't real, the panic and the trauma is the same every time, and it's always just as bad.

There is a slightly cyclical structure to this film, given that we start and end on the same events being played out, and there is a sense of repetition. The phone calls seem to be a never ending cycle, and we see at the end that she hasn't really changed, and she is still doing it and she may never stop. This means that there is no sense of resolution for and audience member.

I liked this sense of repetition in the film, and the idea of repeated images throughout to convey meaning. I may use aspects of this idea in my own work. Stereotypes are also used, especially in terms of the girl being a moody teenager (even though we later discover there is more to the story of why she seems so isolated), and I may try to use slightly stereotypical motifs in my own film due to how it is a short film, and doing this can help get an idea of character across to an audience quickly. I also felt that the film was quite close to being social realism, which is a genre I am thinking of using.

Baby Driver

Baby Driver is a film by Edgar Wright, who took inspiration from a previous music video he'd made for Blue Song by Mint Royale, and expanded on the idea. The film is about a getaway driver who constantly listens to music to help him drive during police chases. We looked at this film to compare the narrative structure in a feature film to that of a short film or even music video. By doing this we found that the feature film usually needs more time to develop the characters and the narrative, whereas the narrative of a short film is able to be compressed into just a few minutes.

The first shot in the opening scene is a close up of a car wheel, much like in the music video. We then have a close up on an iPod and then close ups on four characters in time to the beat of the music. From there three of the characters get out of the car and Baby, played by Ansel Elgort stays inside since he is the getaway driver for a crime the others are about to commit. They get out of the car, pick up bags from the boot and walk across the street in time to the music. The focus of the scene then switches back to the getaway driver instead, much like the music video.