Short Film Research

One of my all time favorite short films is 'Zombie In a Penguin Suit' (2011) by Chris Russell and, unsurprisingly, it is about a zombie that is wearing a penguin suit and the film consists around him wondering around a country eating people and basically just showing what the world looks like after a zombie apocalypse. The reason this is my favorite short film is because of the synergy between the composed music and the films context. It has no little diagetic sound in the film and no speech from any characters (the closest you get is a scream or two) which theoretically for a horror film such as this one, make it hard to relate with the characters and hard to understand their emotions and who they are on a deeper level. However, the context of this film is that the main character is a brainless zombie, so the confusion and enigma around him works extremely effectively and this combine with the ambient, orchestral soundtrack somehow create a huge amount of empathy for the zombie.

The camera and editing techniques used throughout the film also play a big part in the empathy created for the zombie as there are countless hand held point of view shots, also a fair few tracking shots of the zombie, over the shoulder shots, extreme close ups, pans, slow zooms and pretty much every camera technique in the book which all help the audience engage with the character and the situations occurring within the film. The lighting used is also very powerful as in this particular scene when we see the silhouettes of the zombies attacking someone with more silhouettes of people running around in the foreground which connotes the hopelessness of the situation and the denotates the sheer number of zombies there are.

I will think about how lighting, editing and camera techniques are used in this short film when I do my experimental film, and I will also reflect on how an arguably unfitting soundtrack can be used very effectively to give a deeper meaning to a film.