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Comparative Analysis of Short Films!

Realist short lms like any other genre or format of lm has conventions, which are the staples of that genre, its dening factors. These will be used at varying amounts depending on a number of elements of the lms production. Some of these conventions are; long takes, working/lower economic environments, untrained actors and location shooting. These are just four of the hundred conventions of realist short lms. An example is shown of location shooting is Love Me Or Leave Me Alone, Gasman, Antonios Breakfast, Soft and Inseparable. In all these lms we see real locations used to shoot in whether this be inside or outside. This is due to the type of lms they are, they are all British and show elements of realism, and you will nd these realist elements in a lot of shorts as the audiences for both over lap, with the audience usually being an informed one that is looking for something different than mainstream productions. Because of these realist elements the lms use real location to create a less fabricated feel. Although these environments are different. For example in Antonios Breakfast you get a poor estate with many crime problems to represent poor youth and foreign people in Britain. Where as in Inseparable you get the middle/ upper middle class London, with its showing of a highly equipped medical facility and the house the main character lives. At the end of the day the location comes down to what type, group inhabiting the location are trying to be represented. The large majority of stereotypes come form the location someone is from some one is from, so a clear representation of person can come from the location shown.!

The representation of type or group each lm is trying to display is key to the lm as a whole. It sets up the narrative and characterisation. In Love Me Or Leave Me Alone the macro representation of poor northern youth is shown. But obviously with these overall group or type representations comes a deeper representation of the characters is shown through the narrative. Love Me Or Leave Me Alone isnt just about a young poor northern couple, its about the representations of young love and how all consuming it may be. In Soft the representation of a middle class man who has a problem with the common youth in his area is clear but on a deeper level the lm is about the struggles of father, and how ill-equipped they are to deal with certain situations. Gasman shows a poor Scottish family and the struggles of a father that has children from an affair, but also shows themes of sibling rivalry. And Inseparable shows a family man who has to sacrice for the benet of his Son. From these representations of type and the deeper more subtle encoded representations, some patterns occur. The clearest one is that most of the lms listed centre around poverty, and the only two that dont Inseparable and Soft, and these lms probably have the most bold stories of all. It could be said that in these more subtle lm where nothing really amazing happens usually centre around poverty because the more subtle events are made worse by the fact that the characters are very well off in the rst place, adding a new level of drama to the situation shown. The trend of working class settings in realist British productions for years and Samantha Lay talks about it in her book on British social realism. She says that it stems for the idea of wanting to represent the under represented as when realism rst started in focused on the poor. In art for example the modern period started with realism and showing the poor that hadnt been shown in paintings before. I can also see a sleigh change as the newer shorts here like Inseparable and Soft have moved into representing more middle class settings and families as the representation of the poor may be a bit played out now. !

How these representations are achieved whether it be of location, type or group, working classes or middles classes, its done by each lm maker differently. Sound is key to representation and this is employed to create meaning by the lm director in many ways. In Soft you receive an entire lm of diegetic sound, used in creative ways. As the lm comes to its most action lled point instead of music a car alarm in the lm it self is set off, creating a constant state and feel of panic and uncomfortableness. And music can be heard in the lm with the boy playing music out of the speakers in his bed room. Another lm that relies heavily on diegetic sound is Gasman, a very quite production until they get to the party where music and the backing noise of people talking is used to create a sense of chaos. In Love Me Or Leave Me Alone a similar sound scape of a large use of diegetic sound is heard. The same goes for Antonios Breakfast, with the lm only containing

diegetic sound, and this is used like Soft, as when the point of real suspense comes along the beeping of his fathers heart monitor is used to build the tension. Inseparable is the odd one out when it comes to the sound scape of the lm, with its large use of sound design and score to show the emotion in some scenes. At some points the lms music even over powers the diegetic sound, with only the no diegetic sound being heard. Overall the different lm sound results from a slightly different type of lm from the rest. In a way Love Me Or Leave Me Alone, Gasman, Antonios Breakfast and Soft are all the typical British realism when it comes sound. Where as Inseparable displays new take on sound scape and shows more elements of a drama lm. This may have something to do with its age. Its a newer production the others and therefore is trying new things. !

All the lms use lighting in a very specic way to create representation also. Most of these realist British production use a huge amount of low key lighting. Antonios Breakfast for example displays the light usually seen in these types of lms, but here its used to really emphasise the colourless, dreary apartment he inhabits. Where as in Inseparable the lighting is more used to show the severity of the situation the protagonist is in. Marilyn Milgrom talks about the little time you have in a short lm to create representation and push on the narrative, so having a tool like lighting that can do both of those can be useful for a lm maker. For example in Gasman lighting is used to represent the area the family live. Everywhere they go be their home or the surrounding streets is basked in this shade, making everything appear dull. This is a good example of lighting being used to push forward representations in the area of class and status. Love Me Or Leave Me Alone uses lighting to create representations around the area of gender. At one point the female in the lm sits on a fence with the light on her face portraying her as almost angelic, whilst the male in the lm sits in the arm chair of his house, every shot using low key lighting. This pairing of narrative to lighting creates the representation of the chauvinistic male that pushes the girl he loves away to appear strong. The outcast of the group when it comes to lighting is Soft as low key lighting isnt used much in the lm at all. This could be to do with the nice area trying to be portrayed, in contrast to the events that happen, displaying the theme of appearance vs. reality. The lm does use lighting in an odd way though as some the lm uses camera phones footage, and this has a very poor quality meaning the lighting is lowered in these shots showing the dark tone of events taking place. I feel soft was trying to push boundaries slightly with the area and light used. !

The most obvious and key way the lms create representation is through mise-en-scene. Lighting and location (spoken about previously) actually fall under this term, as well as set design, hair and make up, costume and props. This is the section were real differences can be seen but the overall out come is the same. Lets take costume for example In Antonios Breakfast we see the costume of the track suit showing that they are typical thugs, and in Soft we can see the classic short sleeve shirt and black trouser uniform of a man working in an average paying job. So although the costume and representation is completely different the idea is the same. The less dialog and action you have to use to create a representation the better, especially in short lm as the time limitations can be quite conning. You can take hair and make up and see the same thing, in Love Me Or Leave Me Alone the girls lack of make up and strapped back hair show her to be a typical teenage chav and in Inseparable the nicely cut hair of one brother and the shaggy hair and beard of the other show one brother to be of a middle class living style and the other to have fallen on some kind of hard times. Inseparable especially uses very little dialog so these micro elements really help understand the lm. If we look all the lms miss-en-scene that some points do vary. Overall Gasman uses all elements of mise-en-scene to create macro meanings. The lighting and location have been spoken about, but the others are used to effect also. Props such as and pint of beer are used to further the representation of a typical working class father, hair and make up and costume to show the importance of the occasion and also to show the working class back ground as the children only have one set of nice clothes. Colour and set design are used to create the general mood of the lm one that mystery, as you dont really know the relationship between the two sets of children and their parents. And in Soft we see the set design used perfectly to show the middle class house hold with a strict father. The make up is used to show the boys injuries. And the prop of a cricket bat is almost a symbol of power in the hands of a weak boy. Overall all the lms I have spoken about use mise-en-scene in the same way, to create a more rounded overall representation. The differences come with how much of the overall representation comes from

each section of miss-en-scene. It could be said that in Inseparable set design doesnt bring as much macro meaning as the strong low key lighting used. But how much representation is coming from each element is in the eyes of the viewer, all the lms have thought about all the mise-enscene, its down to the audience to decode the macro meanings presented. !

There is one thing all the lms differ on to some degree and thats the form elements of editorial pace and lm running time. It has been said that when it comes to short lm many of the viewers prefer them short 10 minutes or less but the shorts I have mentioned are all longer than this. Inseparable has a running time of around 11 minutes and Antonios Breakfast is 16 minutes long. Gasman is 15 minutes long, and so is Love Me Or Leave Me Alone, and nally Soft comes in at around 14 minutes. As you can see all the lms differ, even Gasman and Love Me Or Leave Me Alone arent both exactly 15 minutes. This is due to the fact that no lm maker would make an idea for a short lm at the exact same length, even if the idea was exactly the same, each lm maker has a different vision for their lm. The editorial pace can also effect the length of the lm, however thats not its primary focus. The editorial pace can change the mood and feel you get when you watch just as much as the music can. For example in Antonios Breakfast the editorial pace remains slow until Antonio starts to panic about leaving his father and the fast parallel editing used really ups the tension and suspense in the scene, the audience can really feel the urgency and panic. In Inseparable the pace stays the same throughout to show how well thought out the events already are by the characters. Soft also shows a pretty steady editorial pace and so does Gasman. Both these lms have different climatic points were the pace builds but thats more for the action ending of Soft where as the Gasman has very little action so has no need to speed up the editorial pace. The pace comes down to how action driven the lm is, the part in Antonios Breakfast where the pace is sped up is when he is running to his father, and in Soft when the bully is confronted. If a lm has no action then theres very little need to up the pace it seems from looking at these lms. !

On the whole all the British realist shorts I have spoken about are all different in many ways, but also all share similar qualities that what make them what they are. They all may have different running times but they are still all short lms. And they show different issues but are all realist. Gasman shows the representation of the working classes that has become a staple of British realism but lacks some of the action seen in other short lms. Antonios Breakfast and Soft use mise-en-scene in a way that allows the audience to identify the type of people the characters may be, like many realist lms, but many more modern shorts are using a strong score to emphasise the emotion in the lm and neither of these lms do. Inseparable uses this strong score but many older realist productions rely on diegetic sound. The shorts are all clearly different and the same. The two lms that differ for the rest the most in my book are Soft and Inseparable, especially Inseparable. Soft can be seen more of challenge of its genre conventions as it uses the middle class setting, high amounts of dialogue, a bright colour palette, lack of low key lighting and action. However Soft still comes across as a true realist production with its use of genre staples such as a large use of diegetic sound and high amounts representation coming from mise-en-scene, but most of all its realist because of its use of social commentary. Samantha Lay says that lm isnt realist unless it has some kind of message, a purpose of making the lm for society. This is were I feel Inseparable being a realist lm is called into question. It was already clear that it was the most different from the other lms with is huge use of non-diegetic sound and not representing the working classes. The lack of social commentary in the lms narrative, character codes and macro representations make it more of a realist drama. The is about a man who nds out he is dying and therefore sends his twin brother home to look after his son and be a dad for him, without the sons knowledge. So although there is themes of sacrice and unconditional love the lm has no real commentary, and also I feel the story to far fetched to a 100% realist production. To conclude I have found that within the British short lm realism genre there are many variations that can be done to a lm with it still being realist, but some factors can not change. Inseparable could be seen as a modern realist production by some, as a natural progression that will move the genre on. But every genre has to have a key factor for action its an action driven narrative and for realism its a story with realistic story and social commentary. !

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