Analysis of a Proffesional Product- My Wrongs 8245-8249 & 117

My Wrongs, directed by Chris Morris and produced by Warp, I consider a wonderful example of a successful short film. It takes a quite abstract idea and through stylising and tight narrative structure turns it into something comprehendible within the restricting boundaries of ten minutes.

First take its distinctive visual style. Every shot is sharply in focus to draw the audience’s attention to specific information most specifically the central character and his limited perceptions of the world around him as he breaks down. The idea of seeing from the point of view of a man mentally unstable is then re-enforced by the jumpy camera style which jerkily zooms in and out. Every shot is a little shaky and loosely framed. Morris also chooses to avoid wide-angles to keep his audience very close to the protagonist and the dog at all times.

The mise-en-scene also helps connect the audience to its central character though it is naturalistic in editing the contrast appears to be heightened which gives it a looser connection with reality and helps enforce the idea of not so much seeing through someone else’s eyes but being trapped in someone else’s head. The protagonists appearance has also taken some thought. He is dressed in a shabby jacket and jeans and his hair is unwashed, contrasted to the neat almost shiny dog and the clean almost sterile looking house he’s been asked to sit it looks like he could have been pulled in off the streets and so when he does break down and end up loitering at the park shouting at ducks he looks less out of place there than in Imigen’s house.

Sound is especially interesting. The music is not so much music but surreal, eerie drawn out notes and similar, even the tone on the answer machine is distorted into one of them so that it becomes like a sound of feedback or similar on the unfortunate protagonists life itself. Then there is the narration, less narration than internal monologue in fact an idea again re-enforced when we are able to hear first the dog and then the baby talk.

But the neat flowing narrative is what I find most inspiring about this film. Each scene flows effortlessly into the next via the internal monologue and the central point of a man walking a dog. Even the bizarre flashback to our narrator’s childhood mid-way through the film seems graceful after the audience have already been introduced to the concept of the talking dog the talking mouse follows naturally and through minimal dialogue provides us with a key back-story. What I like most though is the ending, after a film like this it’s particularly hard to finish it and leave the audience entirely satisfied but Morris does it as he finally pulls back into a wide-shot to show the protagonist shouting at the ducks relieving the audience and releasing them from the madness.



The full film can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgvTApLkC3Y