Inspiration for the chase/murder scene in our film

Inspiration 

No Country for Old Men

Motel showdown sequence 

There is a tense chase scene between 2 main characters. Both characters are very resourceful using the environment to their advantage. 

Camera shots transition from slow and methodical as each character surveys the area around them then moves to fast and jump cuts as action ramps and the two characters confront each other. Dark lighting is used to obscure the villains movement increasing suspense. 

Handheld camera shots are used when characters on foot to make the scene feel more realistic and gritty. Sound design is used well and intense music is used when characters fire their weapons at each other and high pitched ringing sound used when gun is fired in doors furthering realism. 

Music drops out and now sounds from environment like car doors opening, tires screeching and glass shattering which adds to the realism and heightens tension.

Below is a Prezi with some other films that helped inspire us

 

Other films with similar elements and scenes are reservoir dogs, Dog Day Afternoon and Drive(opening scene).

Analysing short films

From the shorts that you have watched so far, try and see is there a formula or pattern to short films...


DogFood
This is a film where a butcher loses his dog and starts to investigate its disappearance whilst two people come in to visit and befriend the butcher. This film followed the familiar short film structure where we don't learn too much about the main character except what is essential to drive the plot forward. For example the butcher is attached to his dog. The directing shows this as there are tight close up shots of him hugging and playing with the dog. When the dog disappears we see that the main characters life goes into depression and whilst this is happening two more characters are introduced to the story. These characters seem mysterious at first and the film heavily implies that they have taken his dog, murdered it and then fed it to him. However typical of short films the twist is that they didn't murder the dog and only took his dog to teach him a lesson. The film ends with these two characters being murdered by the protagonist and fed them to his dog.

The editing is slow paced as the tension builds within each scene of the film. The slow cuts and long takes also help the audience soak in the gruesome imagery of the twist and the ending.

Undying Love
This is a film about the survivor of a zombie apocalypse and shows a day in his life where he goes out to fend for himself and helps rescue a girl. We see the main character wake up, dress himself and go and fight zombies. We don't get any details about the main character through exposition but instead get traits of his character through action shots where we see his resourcefulness and his will to survive. The twist which is a convention of short films is that when he rescues the girl from zombies who are going to eat he takes her home and feeds her to a zombie female who is presumed to be his deceased girlfriend.

This film was extremely effective in achieving its harrowing tone through the use of low lighting and the brief cuts of intense gorey violence. The audience is briefly allowed to enjoy the rescue of the girl before the twist is revealed and the film ends.

An action hero's guide to saving lives
This is a film which pays tribute to the cop/spy movie cliches which audiences who are fans of either genre will be familiar with. It is about a cop who is called into a hostage situation where he infiltrate a warehouse filled with terrorists to disarm a bomb and save the girl. The film's twist is that each time the cop goes into the warehouse and dies the timeline resets allowing the cop to get a little further in the story each time. This leads to humorous scenes where the main character will get far in the story and make a silly mistake like stepping on glass bare footed and then there is a jump cut back to the start. The films jump cuts get more face paced as the story continues and there are more resets. The dialogue references many classic films of the buddy cop genre like lethal weapon and the main character is very self aware completing clice side dialogue characters are saying before they finish. The film never explores why the character can hop back in time and this is effective as it is a short film and the concept is best when not elaborated on so there is more time for humour and action.

The violence in the movie is very tame with little gore shown which fits the light humorous tone the film is trying to achieve. The film ends with the hero completing his mission however there is an additional twist where there is a 2nd bomb which is about to detonate and then the film ends. Overall this film was more humorous then any other film I looked at and seemed to have the highest budget with special effects for the guns and explosions being heavily utilised.

8
8 is a film which shows the conflict between two soldiers in a snowy forest in an unspecified war. They track through the forest which is atmospheric with an ever present owl with snow constantly falling. They each try to outwit each other until the soldier with the gun steps on a mine and this gives the other soldier a chance to wrestle the gun from him and escape however the twist is that the escaping soldier steps on a mine and neither soldier is able to escape. This film we felt was not successful in establishing a consistent tone throughout the movie as it had jarring switches between gruesome violence to childish humour. Also the editing in the movie was too slow and action shots lasted longer than neccessary. Overall when making our own short film this one was useful in showing us what not to do.

Other inspirations for our film

After we thought of our intial idea we searched for other films that were similiar to ours to look at. We discovered a film called 'Cache'/'Hidden' by Michele Haneke which is a film where a couple gets sent unnerving VHS tapes of someone watching their house and other disturbing videos. It is a feature film so it obviously has more time to explore this idea than we did but it was still useful in helping us figure out how we can build tension and suspense using the 'video rewatch' format.



We learned from the opening some stylistic features we could use to convey to the audience that a video is being watched rather than filming a tv screen which would be diffcult due to reflective glare and scan lines. The idea of having the footage pause or rewind would immediately signify to the audience they are watching a video inside the film saving us the time of having to film or do direct capture on a television. The rewind and pause effects can easily be added in final cut in post production which removes a stress from us when we are filming giving us more time to focus on other things.
The mystery element of this film and slasher films like Halloween was something which we would want to implenment because it keeps the suspense throughout instead of showing the killers identity at the start. The concealment of a main characters identity is something we learned about last year when filming our AS film opening when we used tight framing and shadows to conceal the detectives face. Overall there is quite a few elements and aesthetic features we decided to include in our film based on our reasarch of other films and this one in particular.