Short films

The first time it hits

The filmmaker used animation in order to show the love relationship between the girl and the boy and the fact that everything else was black and white made the animations more distinct. They also kept on cutting from the girl to the boy to emphasise their relationship. There were a lot of fast cuts that represented the fast pace life of a teenager and how quickly the boy fell out of love. Two characters helped keep the story simple and the narrative was simple as well, but it was kept interesting by it having an unexpected turn (the girl got hit by the skateboard). The black and white also showed the audience that the teenagers weren’t your everyday teen due to the fact that one of them is a skater boy and the other one appears to be a Goth. The fast cuts also made the audience concentrate more because if they didn’t concentrate they would miss everything.

Job Street

When the one of the male characters were waking up the camera became out of focus and became in focus when he was rubbing his eyes. The audience were seeing the short film from that characters perspective. The camera kept on cutting from one character waking up to another, which told the audience that the narrative was going to be about three main characters. The filmmaker was very careful in making sure that each character got just as much film time as the other. It seemed like a normal day of work for the three men until we saw them lining up on a street. The Asian man needs money because he’s sharing a room with too many other people, so it’s overcrowded. The white man needed money to provide for his family. The black man needed money for his family as well. All the other people had a roof over their heads apart from the black man.

Hard Labour

It wasn’t a simple story, so it was too complicated for it to be a short film that lasts five minutes. I thought the narrative however was very strong. The diegetic sound was constantly playing a sad song, which eased the audience into the world of the film.

Ice-cream dream

Quite interesting establishing shots were used. I thought the short film was surreal and the music made it more surreal, but that’s because the film is targeted at young children not teenagers. The main characters rite of passage is getting over her fear of making friends.