For a limited time only...

**eidde** · January 7th, 2005, 01:26 PM

watched it again with sound and took into consideration some of the comments here.

maybe SPOILERS here....

Seems to me that he is a dreamer or a waster. Not grabbing the moment, but letting life pass by.
She knows this and it makes her sad.
He isnt smelling the coffee but getting obsessed by trivia (tap dripping, drains... etc) and irrellivant things. Not grasping his life.
She can see this.
Eventually it backfires on him, he gets caught in a trap, that many others have fallen for, and will leave him hanging for life...?
Maybe its a trap she has set? When the noose closes in it triggers the scissors to stab her feet, to tell her that she caught another one?
Or that he has finally been caught, and succumbed to a life of "hanging around" - pun obviously intended....
Maybe its none of this. I dont know what the dripping tap Urban Myth is.
Still, its a great little film, even if its not very satisfying (why all the time codes on the coffee jars and mugs.. etc?)
Tend to agree could have been shorter....

Thats my reading anyway, hope it hasnt spoilt anything for those that havent watched yet.
Still thinkg the photography is fab.

**miker** · January 7th, 2005, 06:00 PM

the way I read it, the dripping tap drove him insane (along with his gf filing her nails), he takes solace in the woods where he is mysteriously murdered and hung in a tree.

i did really like the echo of the theme with the drip in the puddle in the woods, cos it's b&w it's not immediately obvious it's blood until we see the other bodies.

i guess there's a psycho on the loose.

perhaps his gf murders him, in which case, what is her motivation?

i dunno. nigel alluded to some urban myth, but it's not one i seem to be familiar with.

**Nigel** · January 7th, 2005, 06:37 PM

Maybe Urban Myth is the wrong word...Perhaps Ghost-Story would be better.

This is a short version(Of course there are many versions). Guy and girl are in car on lonely road. They park under a tree to kiss/sex. The guy hears a dripping on the roof--Yet it is not raining. He gets out to investigate. Doesn't come back. The girl decides she is going to have a look....Gets out and sees her BF and others hanging from the tree with a pool of blood on the roof of the car.

Something like that. I have also heard it as a scraping sound on the roof. But it is always a sound that leads to bodies.

What I think is funny about this thread is that everyone likes the look of the short. Yet, no one seems to pick up on the fact that GS took the time and made the effort to SHOOT FILM.

Good Luck

**untamed_aggression** · January 7th, 2005, 08:28 PM

Nigel, give me the reels and a 16mm camera and I'll shoot film!

Nobody can deny that film is a bajillions times better than video. Doesn't mean that everyone can magically afford it.

And with Generic being at film school, I'd imagine the school pays for his budgets/film/equipment etc...

**tim partridge** · January 7th, 2005, 08:34 PM

Originally posted by Nigel:

What I think is funny about this thread is that everyone likes the look of the short. Yet, no one seems to pick up on the fact that GS took the time and made the effort to SHOOT FILM.

Good Luck

That's because the time and effort went into the brilliant lighting, composition and exposure, not the choice of format. If this short had been shot exactly the same on anything from PD-150 to 65mm it would still look great.

Actually, being a black and white short this may be an exception- photochemical black and white done with this kind of consistent extreme contrast is IMO the most skillful you can get. Well, this side of b/w stills. [img]wink.gif[/img]

[ January 07, 2005 04:36 PM: Message edited by: tim partridge ]

**peter_g** · January 8th, 2005, 12:14 AM

eidde, I have to respectfully disagree with your deconstruction of the short. I don't think that there is anything that suggests that he is a dreamer or a waster, other then this remark:

face of a revolutionary man on the t-shirt of a student who knows fuck-all

At any rate it seems unlikely that the women would denounce the man as a waster, given she too spends night after night sitting on front of the TV.

Generic Skinhead, Please e-mail a copy of the script to [email protected].I think that the problem is just the opposite of your self diagnosis. The problem did not lie with your direction of the piece, but rather with your writing. I suspect a lot of what you wrote about the emotions or subjective experiences of the characters was overly subtle, and as such when represented visually was doomed to failure. The actors could not hope to convey all of this, and neither could you. To put it another way, you wrote a short story for the screen.

**Nigel** · January 8th, 2005, 12:30 AM

Untamed--
Camera rental is cheap. Check around. I know you don't spend more than ?20 on your work. But, for the people that actually look at the numbers of what it costs to shoot Super16 compared to HD will see that they are about equal.

As for the comment that a PD150 would look like Super16 then pass the pipe because I want some of what you have...

Good Luck

**emjen** · January 8th, 2005, 09:21 AM

Or can you just post the script here?

**tim partridge** · January 8th, 2005, 12:21 PM

Originally posted by Nigel:

As for the comment that a PD150 would look like Super16 then pass the pipe because I want some of what you have...

Good Luck

I never said PD150 would look like super16.

To me good photography in film is good storytelling, which is all down to lighting, exposure and composition. That is the ART of cinematography. If you can tell a story well in one format you can tell it well in any- the technical elitisism isn't my thing, I've seen a ton of poorly composed, poorly lit 16mm work out there that crumbles compared to well lit cheapo miniDV, however the 16mm shooters would be first to assume they have "the edge". OBVIOUSLY if 16mm and miniDV were to photograph the same image under the same lighting conditions at the same exposure the film factually records more information, there's no argument there, but to me that's a detail recording competition, not storytelling.

As for the 16mm prices being anywahere near HD, I have to totally disagree on this. I'm currently prepping an HD project I should have funding for soon and there's no way on Earth I could be doing this on 16mm- obviously it depends whether you are going for projection or not, but it all steeps up with stock, processing, telecine, printing, negative cutting, IPs and answer printing. With all the packages like Aftereffects, Magic Bullet etc the layman can't tell the difference IMO- nothing there to distract from the story.

[ January 08, 2005 11:23 AM: Message edited by: tim partridge ]