Short Film Analysis

Before making my own short film i have analyzed 3 short films 

About A Girl.

About a girl was a short film based in Manchester based on a young girl in a dysfunctional family. The lighting in the film is quite gloomy and gritty which makes the atmosphere feel authentic and somewhat sad for viewers. This short film was produced in 2001 and distributed on YouTube. 

I feel that the reason for distributing on YouTube is due to the budget for the project. It is free and simple to upload a video on YouTube and the video can be found on any device that has access to the platform. 

Following on from this the film is clearly run on a low budget and i know this because the film has little to no props and simple but effective camera angles' believe that this makes the short film what it is because it is based in a rough area of Manchester so the simplicity of the film adds to the feeling. The key part of the short film is the small cast used which means that the main focus is on the girl and her life. The dad plays a key part in creating a sense of a dysfunctional family as he doesn't seem to bothered for showing her much attention.

No through road.

A group of teenagers created the discovered footage short film No Through Road in 2009. It has a running length of around ten minutes. The movie opens with a home video of some teenagers having fun while driving about early in the morning. They eventually reach a tunnel with a "no through road" sign the video remains normal until the teenagers start seeing the same sign frequently, at which point they start to fear that they are traveling in circles.

The plot relies on short clips merged together to make a found footage film. It is much less processional than About A Girl and the viewer can clearly tell its a found footage film with the grainy, gloomy footage.  After a while one of the boys spots a man in a mask, so the group speeds off, thinking they have reached safety. However, when they re-enter Stevenage, they discover that the killer is still there, sitting in the tunnel, with their car's lights off.

This film has a fast pace that quickly gets into the story. The film is also broken up in pace by random clips that are organized throughout to make the footage look corrupted  which makes the film have the authentic found footage feel.

The film's editing style is disorganized, with random clips cutting in and out to change between the events shown in the main found footage segment. This horror movie leaves a lot of questions unanswered at the end, like what caused the road to loop and how the boys ended up back there after appearing to have escaped. 

Finley.

Finley is a longer short film as it has a run time of 25 minutes which allows

 it to have a total of six characters. The plot is divided into two parts In the first part three housemates discover Finley in the attic of their new home. Finley then comes to life and tries to kill them, but he keeps failing miserably. Finley returns to the attic in the second act after the two burglars break into the people's home. Finley then uses all of the earlier in the movie's unsuccessful strategies to stop the burglars. 

Due to the increased running duration, more characters and more character development are possible because there is more time for them. The tempo of this movie differs from the other two as well; it proceeds more slowly and spans several months as opposed to a single day. Nevertheless, the movie only had one setting, which is something that all of the previous movies had. 

The longer run time allows for more set up too, having about 15 minutes dedicated just to the first portion of the film.

The movie also has an unsatisfactory ending, which is different from most short films as the ending consists of t Finley intentionally put rat poison in the drinks of the main cast.