Short films

Stripes

I thought the narrative was quite simple in the film stripes, but it was presented in a clever way.  Instead of filming the story at an earlier stage (e.g. when they were in primary school) they chose to do it when both the bully and victim were a lot older, which is the less typical option out of the two. They made a typical story different by making the characters older, which changed their power and status (because when your older your more capable of looking after yourself). The location was quite simple. Although the location was a room we couldn’t see all of the room which kept the location a mystery for a while. The actors were quite good and strong, which made the narrative all the more realistic. How they achieved camera shots were very interesting. Instead of both characters being in one place they made one of the characters move around  in order to get more enchanting shots that looked more realistic. Due to the fact that one of the characters was tied down to a chair his movement was restricted, so they made the villain move up and down instead of allowing him to just sit in front of the victim. They played a lot of attention to props to add realism to the story e.g. there was a lot of blood and the victim looked sweaty and tired, which are signs of being scared or being under pressure/unusual conditions. I like the fact that there were only two characters because it helped make the idea even simpler. Whenever something dropped or someone walked around ect you could hear it. This helped build tension seeming as these on-screen/ off-screen sounds were randomly heard during moments of silence.  Sometimes a shot would be blurred and then focused. I think this shows us the perspective of the victim, who had been kidnapped in his own home. This gave the audience a new way to look at the short film. The audience automatically knew what was going due to the props of a chair and rope (he has been tied up) and the fact that the victim used the dialogue “this is my house” in an agonizing way. They were able to tell the story without going into too much detail into the back-story.