Telling Lies - Simon Ellis (Review)

This clip was about phone conversation between the character ‘Philip’ and his friends and family, we are not shown images but words. Each person was represented by a different colour and the words was shown at different pace to reveal the persons attitude and personality, the size of the words also helped show the tone of the characters speech. Apart from imitating the speech in words the director also included the thoughts of the character which was shown in white text. This Idea reveals the fact that people often say one thing and mean another. This idea is amusing because usually one ‘s thoughts are the opposite of what they are really saying.

The director thought of this idea while sitting in a screening of a poorly subtitled Spanish film. He said that “ Simple spelling mistakes made serious scenes amusing.” he completed the whole idea of characters and colours just as the screening ended. He wrote the script the same evening he planned the idea. He used the Idea for 2 different commissions and was rejected by both followed by harsh comments but he made it anyways and it was one of the most successful short films he has made. He proudly says that the moral of this story is “if the funders say no, make it anyway.”

What I like about this work was that It was interested how just small details such as timing of the text and the colours can reflect a characters personality, I thought although this piece was a simple idea it is affective and it memorable, I was watching a few clips during the screening but I clearly remembered this one, because was unique.

You may watch the clip in the following Link, some information was also gain from this site.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/filmnetwork/A7079510