Analysing a short film relating to the ideas in Monday Morning Madness

1. Lucy McKenna
Key concepts video analysis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2yy_w_I5vo
I am going to analyse the short film ‘Late for work’ this title alone makes me
think it will have a similar basic story line as ‘Monday Morning Madness’ (our
production) this shirt film is from a company called ‘Laugh House
Productions’ again this sort of gives away the tone of the short film, which we
will also incorporate into our short film.
From the beginning we see an alarm clock, although as an audience we have
already been told that this short film is about someone being late for work, it is
enhanced by signal such as the alarm clock being the first thing we see on
screen. When the alarm sounds at 07:30 the character stirs for a bit, hits the
snooze button on the alarm and falls back to sleep. Although we do not see the
time passing through in normal time, there is an almost jump in time until we
see the alarm again signalling 07:38. At this point the character jumps out of
bed in a rush; we now know for certain he is running late. The mise-en scene in
this scene connotates that this person is quite a silly, relaxed, unorganised
person. I get this impression because he has a double bed with a single blanket
on it, he is cuddling a teddy and his alarm clock is on the other side of the bed,
not a bedside table. If this person was an organised type of character, bed
sheets would be in pristine condition, everything would seem more organised
that it does. Throughout this whole short film the setting is quite naturalistic, It
takes place in normal rooms in a house (bedroom, bathroom, kitchen) we will
incorporate this into our production, because although we want it to be funny
we want it to be funny because of what happens to the characters (Joe and
Charlotte) not because of the setting the characters are situated in.
In this short film there is a constant representation of this ‘businessman’ he is
not what we would expect, he is unorganised and not punctual to important
meetings, this makes me feel that although the creators may have simply made
this film for comical reason (like we will with ours) there is also a hidden
meaning. From this short film I get an almost moral interpretation, this man
should be a punctual business man; like we as society expect them to be. But
they too make mistakes, and maybe all businessmen aren’t as organised as we
like to think they are. With our characters we want to explore to extremes of
teenage life, one that is so relaxed, he often forgets, and the other a girl that
couldn’t be seen to be late or slacking, she unlike the boy loves school. Our
short film is aimed to a teenage audience, 13-15 year olds and so we want it to
be comical. I feel that ‘Late for work’ is aimed at a higher age boundary than
ours, even though a younger audience would find certain aspects of ‘Late for
work’ funny, I don’t feel that we could get away with having a child sticking its
middle finger up to the character. This is funny, but not what we are going for
at all.

2. Lucy McKenna
In this short film there is music playing throughout this reinforces the
characters emotion; when he is running around getting ready, the music is fast.
And when he reaches work and we have established he has forgotten to put his
trousers on, the music changes into the classic that shows his embarrassment.
In ‘Late for work’ the character wakes up for work, almost everything that
could go wrong does, he is still running late, he grabs his car keys. We then see
him setting off to work in his car, when he starts thinking he may make it on
time, a young girl steps out into the middle of the road, then we see his panic as
he stops, she sticks her middle finger up to him. Next we see clips of him
rushing through work, bashing into people and generally causing an upheaval.
We also see smippets of the meeting; which we as an audience assume he is
supposed to be a part of. When he finally reaches the room he is supposed to be
in, all we see is the reaction on his ‘colleagues’ faces. They are disgusted,
except from the other guy in the shot, he seems quite happy with whatever has
happened. Again I think this is a reference for a maybe older audience. The
camera then does a close up of his feet and moved up, until we see bright
orange pants, this is the antithesis, the bad thing that happens in the short film.
Although nothing in the scene has been all that good for him, this is the climax
of the bad luck for the character.
There is some useful things in this short film that I would like to incorporate
into ours, such as the close up of the alarm clock just as it changes time, the
music constantly building throughout, and the slow unveiling of the climax
(one of the characters being late for school).