RED - Claire

RED -

The short film ‘RED’ is a story of a man who commits murders. He kills women wearing red dresses. At the beginning he is photographing a crime scene and the woman is wearing a red dress, the next scene he opens his wallet and you see a picture of him and a woman in a red dress so my first thought was that he’d just taken photos of his wife/girlfriends death. As you can see from the progression of these pictures.

As you can see the mise en scene colour pallet is very dark and dull, which I think represents his mood. Although the red dress does stick out to me and is very bright, which I think shows as a weakness to him and reminding him of his girlfriend/wife. This could be his ‘happy’ or ‘significant’ colour. The lighting in these shots are low key, there’s not much shadowing it’s just very dark and hard to see which create enigma.

From the very first opening shot you get the feeling it’s of thriller/horror genre. From the low key lighting, dark colour pallet and non-diegetic soundtrack. the soundtrack opening starts with a Cello, and pans across the screen showing the initial colour pallet, the low key lighting and then the man with the camera, as it pans along you get a sharp high note of the cello which builds tension and creates enigma. You see the man with the camera at his car and close the boot to which they have a sound effect for of the boot closing. As he closes the boot the soundtrack comes back on of the cellos and I believe them to be violins, to which the mood is slightly lifted and it becomes less sinister but more questionable. This is where you first see his camera. This is a big part of the story line.

There are only two different shot sizes in this first part. A ELS panning shot as the opening, until you see the camera man. It then goes to a CU of his camera which makes the camera a significant part of the film. This is indicated because it’s the first CU shot of anything and it’s shown before his face.

The title of the film isn’t shown till 44 seconds into the clip. The title is shown in block capitals, with slashes through it and writing in grey across it.

Shortly after this it skips to the camera man in a bar drinking and looking at newspaper with ‘The Red Dress Killer Strikes again’. From a high angle MLS looking down on the camera man drinking; you can see the fan above him, the newspaper and his camera. There is also an empty stool next to him which suggests the feeling of him being alone, which is also shown by his body language as he is constantly closed in. It goes to a CU of his camera and the newspaper then flips to a MCU of the camera man pulling his wallet out of his pocket which is when you see the first picture of him and his wife/girlfriend, with her wearing a red dress. There’s then a sort of over the shoulder shot when the chief man looking at the pictures the camera man took of the crime scene. This gave me more of an impression that camera man was a crime scene photographer and the story line became clearer to me and further explained.

But the next part further developed the story line and created more enigma on what was going to happen. There’s a MCU shot of the camera man drinking and someone barges into him and his drink goes everywhere, from his facial expressions you can see he is angry; the soundtrack comes in and is distorted, with a slight piecing edgy sound. Then it changes to a side MLS of him from the right, the lighting against his face makes him look scarier contrasting with the colour pallet, the slight light on the sides of his head and cheek bones bring out the anger on his face creating enigma by asking what he’s going to do about.  It then changes to a POV shot, to which he sees the man who pushed into him walking towards a woman in red dress. You then get a CU shot of camera man and see faintly on the screen what he’s seeing happen with the man and the woman in the red dress, you have the street light and the red from the dress lighting up the screen along with his eyes constantly being lit up.