Short Film Analysis 1

The Siren

The Siren is a short film directed, written and created by a group of student filmmakers for their university courses. The film was a great success and won awards at 9 different film festivals such as the ‘official selection’ at the Cornwall Film Festival.

The Siren is drama about a retired trawler man who is facing the decline of his twilight years as he begins to catch visions of a beautiful young woman, representing both his doom and redemption.

We see shots of this old character all alone and going about his daily life, through what happens we can see how he is reminiscing about his past. He starts seeing a beautiful woman and goes out looking for her but fails. He then takes his little rowing boat on the water and we see him and the siren touch and the film ends.

I absolutely love this film; it is charming, memorable and cinematically brilliant. The way the shots are composed are fantastic and the sharpness, depth of field and smooth movements of the camera really help towards a professional feel. The purpose of this film is to make the audience sympathies with the character, therefore drawing the viewer into the film. The opening scene is an establishing shot of Weymouth, which shows immediately the setting, and then goes to a shot looking through the sand dunes at the old man on the beach. This shot has a great depth of field, with the reeds in front out of focus and the man in focus, clearly showing that he is alone on the beach. The fluid motion of the camera movement is also very interesting due to the amount of pans that follow the main character, although as the film gets to the end there is noticably less movement. I believe that this is because the camera motion within the film relates to the fluid movement of life, and as the character progressivly gets older, the motion begins to fade and eventually stops.

I think this film has an adult target audience, not because of any adult content, but just for the fact that children may not understand it. Its quite morbid in the way that it can show life and death, which may prove to be more effective in the older generation because they themselves are closer to death then children.

The film was shot in Weymouth using a Canon 7D DSLR, which gives us the crisp sharpness and fantastic depth of field. The soundtrack really contributes to the films impact on the viewer, building with emotion to make the viewer sympathetic and background noise when people are talking. The editing is quite basic in this film, with a number of jump cuts and fades on the title, which is shown at the beginning and the end.

It is important to note, that there is no dialogue in this film, and this is why the acting, cinematography and soundtrack play such a key role. The fact there is no dialogue could connote even more loneliness and remoteness to the viewer which the character is feeling.

I feel that in my short film I am to create (depending on the content) I should get some suitable music to create a soundtrack. For this I hope I could get some copyright free music, but we’ll see when we get to plan the film.