Soft by Simon Ellis https://vimeo.com/19705053
Incredible piece that makes you think about many different things. Anger towards the Dad? Anger at the gang for what they are doing?
This story could have had many potential sources:
TV? Newspaper? Personal Experience? Seeing the act in place?
In fact simon ellis witnessed a kid being bullied and his father (who was a bus driver) saw his child being bullied and didn’t stop to help.
Coming up with pitches:
You want to tell the audience the best parts about the film but without telling the whole story.
In the pitch you don’t have to tell the whole story, just the part that will make the viewer want to watch.\
Soft: Its main features.
Genre: Drama / Social realism.
Setting: Urban - Average town community
Characters - Father / Son / Youths (Gang)
Conflict: Violence / Boredom / Father and son domestic / Internal and emotional
Theme: Do what you think is right / Fatherhood - what you think you should do, but then actually doing it / Fear / Masculinity / Growing Up
25 Word pitch for Soft:
“Social realist film set in an urban village, where both the father and son handle the same situation in very different ways, despite internal conflict.”
We saw the imdb listed the description as “A father rediscovers his fear of confrontation at the worst possible time.” We didn’t want to copy it, but took the idea of confrontation to include the “internal conflict” in our pitch.
Our pitch could have been shorter as we didn’t need to double up on “social realist” and “urban” as its a given it would be in an urban environment.
Analysing Soft
The only thing that really dates it is the phone camera, which is really bad quality, when nowadays it would be basically as good as the other footage.
The father perfects the park, we then can tell he has just come home from work. We can tell this from his clothes so we don’t need to be told, we can also tell what time of day it is possibly (5-6pm) because thats the time we expect somebody to be home.
This shot is mirrored later on, bookending the film more or less.
The shot inside the house, shows right away there is conflict in the household. We expect it to be a bad relationship between the two. First sight of the cricket bag, which will be important later.
The phone camera defines the youths, we know its them from the beating up scene. At the moment the one camera dines the youths and the high quality defines the father. As of yet the two haven’t crossed paths.
The father walking into the local shop tells us a lot about him, he is not very sociable and the ship keeper doesn’t really have a friendly relationship with the father.
The body dance shows the thug has achieved what he wanted, its the sign of his mission being complete?
Looking at the thugs from behind “bars” blinds. That makes you think of being trapped and danger.
The phone footage shows us that it is related to the fight right at the start of the film, father and son both experiencing the same situation.
The cricket bat was implanted in the viewers mind so it is no surprise when he picks it up and hits it.
Back to the same high shot of the house and in a short amount of time a lot has changed and this bookends the film.
No comments:
Post a Comment