Semiotic Analysis

Semiotic Analysis



Gasman

http://a2shortfilmbse.blogspot.com/2007/09/final-idea.html

Gasman is a very well put together production. It is set in Scotland and suggests to the audience that it is a very hard time to be unemployed. This short film shows how one man has a hidden life by having two separate families which he keeps to himself, there are 4 children in the film, two are related to the father and the other two the audience do not know about until later in the film. The film elopes until the audience question the relation between all 4 children!
The short film finishes quite abruptly and has an open narrative which makes the audience ask questions about what they have just seen.

The short film has a fantastic range of shots, for the first couple of minutes all of the shots close/medium shots of legs and arms which mean the audience cannot see any facial expressions. This lasts for around 2 minutes until the audience finally sees the face of the protagonist. As the short film continues the shots vary from close ups to long shots, this gives variation to the production and as the audience have waited so long for a different shot it is a great way to start the film.

Once the family get to the train tracks where they meet another boy and girl the audience see’s a story emerge as the father flicks the mother hair, this suggests to the audience that there has been a bond between the two. This is backed up by the similarities between the sets of children.

As the short film continues the audience start to see more similarities between each set of children, one of the most striking points is that they both seem to think that the dad is father to both sets of kids, this is when one of the girls sits on the fathers knee and the other girl gets jealous and starts to fight with the girl. We then hear the girl on the knee shout “but he’s my daddy” and this is exactly what the audience thinks in the first place.

In terms of editing and mise-en-scene it is quite simple in terms of how they have edited it as they use a wide range of shots and keep it simple, the misse en scene is also key to the short film, it suggests that the film is set about 30 years ago as of the clothes and the situation/scene that it is in.
Overall the short film was very interesting, it had a wide range of shots, which keeps the audience hooked, and it has a quite good plot, which introduced a sub plot to the film. I think that the mise-en-scene was well chosen because it fits the time period, the audience would understand that at this particular time period those times were hard. So the mise-en scene aids this understanding.




Stoobi