I should have posted this months ago. It's old news now. If you haven't seen it already, this is the short I made which, to my surprise, got accepted to the 2008 Cannes Film Festival Short Films Corner. Special thanks to Philip, Ted, Mimi, Will, Jesse and Henry on this one.
Okay, I wasn't sure if I wanted to do this...but I'll do it anyway. I haven't analyzed films since my UCSD Visual Arts classes. What better way to start up again, than to analyze my own short film? Trust me, I'm not trying to show off or anything, but rather maybe give some insight about the work. When I made this short, I knew I wanted to see and hear certain things, but I didn't really think about the reasons. Now that it's been completed for awhile, I'm beginning to think I had a subconscious plan for everything (okay that sounded kinda cocky, sorry). Either that, or you can just say I'm BS-ing all this. Which...I would still be semi-proud of.
NARRATIVE STRUCTURE: Glimpses and windows. I have a thing for just seeing a part rather than a whole. Why? Maybe I'd rather savor one instance rather than know the whole story. There's something fascinating about catching two people in mid-conversation and trying to figure out what's going on. To me, it's much more genuine and believable. Or maybe I'm just a lazy writer. In the case of this short, the structure is fragmented because I feel like that's how our memories and thoughts come to us. However, one memory sparks another and this is how Robin's story is told.
COLOR: If you notice carefully, most of the shots are a mixture of warm and cool tones, especially blues and oranges. According to the one high school art class I took, blue and orange are complementary colors. When we see them repeated in the piece, they work to emphasize the ups and downs, beginning and end, reality and daydream.
ENERGY AND CYCLES: The spinning coin, the radiometer. These are both revolving objects that require energy to keep moving. Maybe it's obvious, but as we see more and more of Robin and Adams' relationship, we see the energy fade away until it is no longer in motion. In terms of cycles, the beginning and ending of the short are vaguely connected. How much truth and fiction behind Robin and Adam is uncertain but it is very possible that they did meet or will meet in the future. Even the last shot of the short dissolves seamlessly into the first shot to suggest a sort of repetition and cycle.
VISUAL DEPENDENCE: Have you ever had a phone conversation where you are communicating, but your gaze is out the window– or doodling on some paper? Sometimes, we don't need to see a character say a line to know how they feel, or what they're thinking. If we see what they see within that conversation, we have a more intimate and matching experience. Our imaginations are powerful and a lot of times it can fill in the blanks much better than what is shown on screen.
TIME: We spend so much of our life waiting for things to happen. Or waiting for things not to happen. Sometimes we wait with someone, sometimes we wait alone, sometimes we enjoy the time, sometimes it's painfully unbearable. Within the short, there are numerous moments where the characters wait for each other. The reason for waiting, duration of waiting, and willingness to wait differ greatly but are significant markers in the relationship.
CHANCE AND POTENTIAL: We are told about a young man and womans' relationship through Robin's thoughts. Whether it is a recollection of personal memories or a fictional story, is irrelevant. However, in the representation of her story, we see her and the young man across the street, as characters. Is the man across the street Adam? Not necessarily, but Robin does insert the image of him as Adam's character in the story she tells. When she bumps into him at the end, she is given a chance to say something. Like Robin said to Adam, if she's one in a million and there's six million people in the city, there could be five other versions of her in the city. Perhaps the man she bumps into is a different version of the Adam in her story.
INFLUENCES: Wong Kar Wai, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tom Tykwer, and Makoto Shinkai
Wow...I'm kinda rusty but I really do feel like I just wrote something up for one of my old classes. Now is the time when I simply hope the TA falls for my transparent ideas and gets lost in my overly-complex sentence structure. Pretty please.
In other news...making shorts about bittersweet love stories is fun n' all..but c'mon. Where's the real thing?
