'The Life Size Zoetrope' and 'Life and Stuff' Reflection

Two experimental short films that I have come across which are similar to our concept are 'The Life Size Zoetrope' and 'Life and Stuff' featured on the FutureShorts website. Both of these short films are useful to refer to when developing our idea, as the theme of life is what we are focusing on within our concept of memories flashing before your eyes in a situation of death.

 

The Life Size Zoetrope(Dir. Mark Simon Hewis)

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-75uRHYHWE

 

I really like the cinematography and visual style of this short film, as well as the way that the narrative is told through a mix of both voiceover narration and other background sound use. The pace of the visuals is also interesting and something that we could incorporate into our idea when we add visuals to our audio piece at a later stage. The main aspect of this short film that I have taken away and considered also applying within our own audio as well as visual project is the way in which the start of the piece is repeated at the end, in order to tell the story in a non linear structure. We could perhaps do this with the sounds of beeping hospital machines, or even just a simple concept such as somebody breathing, without the need for a voiceover narration. The short film seems quite busy in terms of the pace as well as mixture of sounds used alongside the visuals, which works well in creating a sense of urgency or feeling of a fast paced life for the audience.

Life and Stuff
(Dir. Kumar Satjunarasa, UK, 2011)

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWrmAuEwKRs

This short film has been useful to come across in my research as we are developing our idea, as it features a voiceover narration of a series of events within a single lifetime. Although at this stage we do not aim to include a voiceover narrating our project, this could be an option at a later stage if our concept is still not coming across strongly enough to our audience. I also think we would like to achieve something similar to the simplicity of this short film; the mixture of sounds at the beginning and the end and the background sounds in between. The pace of the piece also adds to the intensity of fitting in a lifetime's worth of memories in a few minutes worth of visuals and audio. This has inspired me to think about the development of our project, in terms of how we could use pace as a tool to create a build up of narrative development within recreating memories. I like the idea of slowing down the sounds that are reflections of the memories within the later stages of life, and speeding up the older, more distant memories. I also like the idea of attaching this with a theme of memory loss as the person is aging mentally as well as physically, in a non- linear structure, although I am not sure that this would be possible given the short running length of the piece.