Soft & Telling Lies (Simon Ellis)

Soft is a short British drama film, which was made in 2007 written and directed by Simon Ellis. The film is about bullying and peer pressure. The first sequence shows flickering mobile phone video footage of a teenage boy getting brutally beaten up. An inspired opening. A later sequence, now on the same low pixilated mobile phone type footage, shows the same teenage gang with a showing off type leader, bullying and scaring adults outside a newsagent.




Cut to an overhead of a quiet road. A man, the boy’s father, is coming home from work. The man comes home and is shocked to see his teenage son is bruised and bloody  it is the same boy from the video. Then the gang turns up outside their house, sitting on the man's car, taunting them both, and the son is horrified to discover that his father who always told him to stand up for himself is scared.

Soft is relevant in a society when we hear about teenage violence and stabbings all the time. And it is brilliant because grownups sometimes forget how scared they often were as children of bullies or anything else. A child's second worst nightmare might be to be bullied but his or her greater nightmare would be for the parents to find out about it. A parent's greatest nightmare, greater than this, would be to be bullied and for his child to find out and to be scared in front of his child, because it’s embarassing.

The film was shot over 5 days for the sum of £50,000, the short film is the product of a sponsorship by the UK Film Council and Film4.

Based on the film reception and feedback, Simon Ellis short film was a great success. Soft won 38 festival prizes including the International Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Best Short Film at the British Independent Film Awards, and both BAFTA and European Film Awards nominations. In 2012 he also won at the International Film Festival for Best Of British Awards.

Now ‘Telling Lies’ is about a man going through several phone calls the night after he has spilt up with his girlfriend and had a one night stand with someone.

This clip was about phone conversation between the character ‘Philip’ and his friends and family, we do not see any 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.

Simon Ellis 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.

The effect of just having words i think is in some cases just as effective as having images because its almost as if the artist who made this piece has someone to hide by using words and it keeps the audience watching and thinking something is going to happen.


There are many similar factors about both short films but the main is relationships. Along with that, they are both dramas, so both of the short films make you feel some kind of emotion throughout or after. Sympathy was caused by both film, you can’t help but feel sorry for father that couldn't handle the confrontation, so he couldn't help his son like every father would do if there was ever a problem and then there's the man who found out that his girlfriend and best friend had slept with each other.The main difference between the two films is that one of them only contains text throughout it all, which is different not just from 'soft' but from other typical films too.

Aswell as doing films Simon Ellis also does music videos and television and much more. Having just won the international competition at Toronto's Worldwide Film Festival with his Cinema Extreme short film Soft, Simon Ellis recently attended Hamburg Short Film Festival with the same film, and two others.