Splitscreen: A Love Story shot on Nokia N8
Winner of the recent Nokia Shorts 2011 filmmaking competition, Splitscreen: A Love Story is a short film shot entirely with Nokia’s N8 mobile phone (in 720P @ 25fps). The surprisingly watchable footage uses dual frames to represent two ‘days in the life’ — one set in Paris and one in New York — with the shots arranged to show the two lives proceeding in harmony, half a world apart. (They don’t stay apart, though. Watch and see.)
It’s an interesting visual concept that is explored here by director JW Griffiths (a name which, on a filmmaker, must signify either incredible luck or extreme commitment). Meaning is ordinarily visualised in a film with an edit, and an edit is just a way of comparing two shots in time. By comparing images in space instead, in more of a comic book style, the director has made the juxtaposition concrete — it’s ‘before your very eyes’, instead of in the cut. It’s more immediate.
So there is just something more documentary in feel about a splitscreen edit. We’ve posted our own splitscreen experiments here. One of the neat things about Griffiths’s approach is that rather than contrast very different things to go for irony, he aligns the shots with amazing precision in an attempt to erase (rather than accentuate) the rift between them — which is likely why he skipped the customary black line separator.
Extra film-geek fun is to be had watching the Nokia handset mounted on a stabiliser and on a bicycle in the accompanying ‘Making Of’.
[via Open Culture]
