Sign Language

Sign Language is a short film that has one main character (the protagonist) called Ben who has a job of holding up a sign in the street as advertisement. The film follows him through documentary drama conventions as he looks into the camera and talks as if he is being interviewed even though the content is scripted and fictional. The film is about his last day on the job and how he interacts with the people he 'works' with, with the conclusion of the film being that he actually sums up the courage to talk to a girl who hands out leaflets.

I really liked this short drama piece as it doesn't follow the normal drama conventions and has a heavy weighting on using documentary themes in it which gives the film a unconventional and original edge to it. It also uses subtle comedic elements alongside moving and emotional ones which makes the film really play with the audiences feelings and engage deeper with the plot. The performance the main actor gives is also quite strong as he does a lot of acting with his eyes and through body language which means the strength of the film doesn't have to come from the dialogue.
The use of sound in the film really helps it as well because it uses, along side the atmosphere track of the road, a slow, acoustic piece of music in the background throughout which is very effective in pulling on the emotions of the audience and enabling them to empathise with the character more. As the sound designer on our project, I will attempt to replicate and adapt this style of backing track which can manipulate the emotions of our audience in order to portray characters persona's better and ultimately increase the strength of our film.

The things that I don't think worked very well in this film are some of the individual shots but mainly that the whole film was shot in hand held which I think didn't work for quite a lot of it. For example when introducing the characters location (Oxford Street in London) all the location establishing shots are shaky which makes the film hard to watch and the details hard to make out. The focus on a lot of the shots is also questionable as the film is clearly filmed on a DSLR meaning there is a heavy focus on depth of field and back-grounding and foregrounding which I believe was not taken into consideration during this film. There are shots when we can see the protagonist Ben setting up on the other side of the street to where the camera filming him is and the foreground is focused on a lamp post which draws are attention to that and not Ben's performance in the background. This is an example of the individual shots that I don't agree with as it seems as if it was just thrown into the mix just because it was filmed which suggests that there wasn't a clear storyboard or structure prior to the day of the shoot.

Overall I think the film as strong and weak points but is overall quite strong due to the actors non-verbal performance, the sound design, and the originality of the context of the film. I will try and take both negatives and positives on board when making our own drama piece to make sure we don't make the same mistakes made in this film, and also to apply