rehemad: The Dipper Directed by PJ Harling, The Dipper is a short film that I watched in my media class. This short is filmed well and incorporates urban realism with crime very professionally.
This short film focuses on a young man who is a con-artist; he is looking for a new mark and his voiceover shows the audience how confident he is in his abilities. The con-artist finds his mark in a woman- he then steals here purse before fleeing and making haste with the woman’s purse. He bumps into a police officer and is stopped as he looks agitated- the police officer catches the young con-artist after finding out that the purse is stolen (but the identification is of a man). The audience are then shown the events that happened previous to meeting the con-artist (centered around the woman he stole from) and we find out that the wallet belongs to a man who she found being attacked- she then chose the con-artist as someone to frame as she realised that he was looking for someone to con.
The camera shots used in this short film are quite standard- long shots to establish location, mid shots/close ups to establish characters and tracking shots to help move the plot line. Overall the editing for this short is rather slow paced, however, there are moments when the editing speeds up- e.g. when the con-artist bumps into the woman, and when he is running away.
The one thing that I did not find beneficial to this short film was the choice of text when the con-artist was describing the people he could see in the street (when he was looking for a mark). The caption such as ‘happiness’, I found, was placed rather strangely on the woman’s bag and was in a font that did not quite fit the mood of the short film. I did find the caption to be ironic as the con-artist thought the woman would be his ‘ticket to happiness’, when she was, in fact, his demise.
