In our seminar last week (6/10/16), we watched a number of short films and picked 1 film each, from the categories of Drama and Documentary, to write an analysis on.

The film I picked in the category of drama was a 2002 film called Salaryman by Jake Knight. It is a portrayal of a business man in Japan who works long hours. The main focus of the film was on the repetitiveness and how mundane the salaryman's day to day life was. Knight used powerful techniques such as wide angle locked down camera shots down long corridors and across vast repetitive blocks of flats. This emphasized endlessness and gives the impression that all these workers are simply numbers in a much larger system. The worker who features in this film says in his narration that his life is like a circle, it just repeats and he struggles to remember what he did yesterday. Knight takes this and veers away from the usual Hollywood narrative format by showing the end scene at the very beginning, thus showing visually this idea that his life is going round in a circle. I very much enjoyed this film as I think the director very successfully uses filming techniques to tell the story with very little actual narration. By using the above techniques and others, such as showing only mundane colours and a lack of vibrancy, he creatively introduces us the depressing world of a salaryman.

The next film I picked was a 2010 documentary film called Strange Lights by Joe King & Rosie Pedlow. It tells the tale of unexplained lights seen in the sky in 1980 in Rendlesham Forest by American service men at an RAF base. The main theme of the piece appears to be the replication of the events witnessed using modern day film and sound techniques and old radio recordings taken from the original night. The directors must have taken the idea of confusion and spookiness when the servicemen saw the lights and attempted to replicate it in a more abstract form with this piece. There is heavy use of timelapses throughout the film which show quite stunning images of stars moving in the night sky and bright illuminated campsites contrasting with the dark forest. I was not fully convinced however with the purpose of the timelapses as, while it did a good job of showing time moving fast and transitioning, it was not necessarily contributing to the story it was trying to tell. It made successful use of its sound design however using a multilayered design of distorted radio sounds and the actual recordings of the servicemen describing the lights they were seeing over their radio. There would be intermittent flashes of light shown on the screen that were synced with sudden loud bursts of radio distortion. This helped add weight to the flashes and showed that these resembled the lights the servicemen may have seen on the original light. While i believe the film did successfully show a good replication of what was seen and felt on that night, it did seem that film went on a bit too long for its on good especially when it was long abstract shots that could quickly lose the attention of an audience.