Tick Tock - Short Film Analysis

Tick Tock By Ien Chi a short film that follows a young man trying to fulfill his highest ambitions in the space of 5 minutes, as he thinks that he is on the verge of dying. The amount of effort and work that has been put into this film (it was all taken in one short) is astounding. In fact the director himself says that it took 36 takes to get the shot right.

The first thing I noticed about the film was that the credits were fairly simple, and none of them even included the title of the film, instead you are thrown straight in to the action and the first thing you see is a clock that is actually ticking backwards which immediately creates a sense of mystery around the film as that is not something you would normally see. The camera then pans very quickly to a lady who appears to be in a small room, similar to that of a university/college campus. 

The next shot then consists of diagetic sound as the two characters speak, and there is also a non diagetic sound of a heartbeat in the background which could represent the mood of the male character at that time.As the film progresses you notice that the heartbeat starts to get a lot faster, this may be due to the fact that as the story is going backwards we are discovering the origin of what caused his heart to beat so fast and give a sense of anxiety throughout the film. 

Throughout the clip as we see the journey the young male made to who is presumably his ex-girlfriends place (subtitles say "when I broke up with you") large words appear which seem to be revealing the males true thoughts , for example when he is on the phone to his parents , the word indifference appears which signifies that maybe the call he is making to his parents is of no significance because he thinks that he is going to die. 

One observation I made was that throughout the film all of the non diagetic sounds had an echo to them, this creates suspense throughout the film as it makes the scenes feel more dramatic. These echos also help add to the confusion as the story is being told backwards yet the sounds are playing normally and not backwards. 

The film uses subtitles throughout which was an interesting choice as subtitles aren't usually used in short films. One thing that I noticed about the subtitles were that certain parts were put on their own to give more of an impact, an example of this being used is when the male says "Call 9-11" and that subtitle is on its own as a pose to being with more text which creates much more of a dramatic impact as it stands out on its own. 

One thing thing that is quite subtle that I didn't notice at the first time of viewing was that as the film goes on the film is slowly going from colour to black and white, an effect that even though not very noticeable, goes a long way to giving the impression that something is wrong, it matches the action quite well because as we see everything in colour it seems as if all is well yet as we learn more and the black and white is more prominent we see the dark side of the character and the black and white reflects this well.