'Alive In Joburg' By Neill Blomkamp - Short Film Research - Sam Swinson

'Alive In Joburg' By Neill Blomkamp - Short Film Research - Sam Swinson

About the Film (Director, Release date, Overall plot and Issues):

This short film is a 6 minute short that was created by Neill Blomkamp. It was initially released in 2005 and then it was officially released in 2006. I found this short film on YouTube which is a video sharing platform.

This short film is about the human race having to deal with extra-terrestrial beings invading Earth. These extra-terrestrials have massive spaceships that fly above the city and tap into the electricity and water supplies. The aliens were used a slave labour and they had to live in "conditions that were not good". This film takes place in South Africa in the 1990's which means that the aliens were forced to live with the already oppressed black population. This caused conflict with both the non-white and white populations.

This short film has a found footage style to it which is very interesting and helps the audience believe that this actually happened. On top of this, the film has an interesting part to it because all the interviews with people that don't mention extraterrestrials are taken from real interviews with South Africans and they are talking about Zimbabwean Refugees. This short film is of the Si-Fi genre because of the aliens. Also, the use of guns and soldiers shows the action and adventure genre.

Concepts:

I will be applying 3 media concepts to this short film. I will apply:

• Narrative
• Media Language
• Genre

Each concept will be colour coded to make it easier to see where I have applied each concept to the short film.

Analysis:

Narrative & Media Language:

• The film starts with an extreme long shot of an alien spaceship and an overturned truck in the middle of the road (Figure 1).
• The camerawork suggests that this is a found footage style film because the camera is shaky.
• Straight away this is a use of Barthes enigma code because the audience is wondering why the truck is overturned.
• Also, the audience is wondering why there is a spaceship in the sky.
• There is a build up of non-diegetic background music that is hard hitting dramatic music to emphasise these soldiers going towards the spaceship.

Figure 1

• Next, there is a close-up on a character that appears to be some kind of scientist because of the book props behind him and the setting of the shot appears to be in a lab library (Figure 2).
• He starts talking about the aliens like a narrator and he is giving extra information about the aliens to the audience to help them understand what is going on.
• His facial expression shows confusions and betrayal because the government forced the aliens to be slaves for them.
• On top of this, his body language is very stiff and serious because the situation that the human race is in is very serious.

Figure 2

• After this, there is a mid shot of an alien robot and then there is a cut to a long shot of two soldiers as the get of a helicopter (Figure 3, 4).
• This is use of Barthes Action Code because the audience can sense that a shootout is going to happen between the human soldiers and the alien.

Figure 3

Figure 4

• Then during the shootout, there is a build up of non-diegetic background music which build up suspense.
• The music is dramatic action music to keep the audience interested in the action.
• Additionally, there is a long shot of the two soldiers standing behind a pillar when the alien throws a truck at them (Figure 5).
• This adds tension to the piece because the audience is not sure if the soldiers are going to survive or not because the truck gets very close to the soldiers and hits the pillar the are standing behind.

Figure 5

• Next, the audience is told that this takes place in South Africa in 1990 which suggests to the audience that the aliens could be treated the same as the black people at that time.
• A close-up of the scientist character as he talks about how the aliens are treated further emphasises the point that the aliens were treated like black people and were living in poor conditions (Figure 6).
• The dialogue is "they were living in conditions that were really not good".
• The use of a close-up is to put emphasis on the facial expression of the character which shows he is sympathizing with the aliens.

Figure 6

• After this, there is an increase in pace during a shootout involving both the aliens and the police force (Figure 7).
• There is a build up of non-diegetic background music to add tension.
• Also, this shows Levi-Strauss's narrative theory of Binary Opposites because the aliens are powerless and are trying to fight to get fair treatment and the police force are powerful and are trying to fight the aliens to keep them in their place.
• There are lots of cuts and shaky camerawork to make the audience feel the suspesnse.

Figure 8

• Next, we get a sequence where we can hear the narrator and we are seeing the conditions the aliens live in and the aliens themselves (Figure 8).
• During the diegetic off-screen dialogue we here the scientist say "the government was creating a fear" to "stop anyone from rising up".
• This again links back to the powerful vs the powerless because the powerful are stopping the aliens from rising up by using some aliens as examples and killing them.
• This is using of force by the powerful to keep the powerless without power.
• In addition, we sympathise with the aliens because we can see the terrible conditions they are living in.

Figure 8

• After this, we get a mid shot of a black character while wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a gun to protect himself (Figure 9).
• This is a real person talking about his experience with Zimbabwean refugees.
• I can tell this because the person doesn't talk about the aliens specifically and in the subtitles, there are brackets to relate this to the aliens.
• This is an effective way to use real life footage and use it in the film.

Figure 9

• Then there is a mid shot of a police helicopter piolet as he describes the ship (Figure 10).
• His facial expression shows that he is frightened of the ships because of the scale of them.
• The diegetic dialogue is "you are talking about ships that are a kilometer in length".
• This puts into perspective how big the ships are and puts emphasis on the audience.
• Also, this makes the audience understand why the humans are worried about the aliens, hence, why they are so tough on them.

Figure 10

• After this, there is a close-up on an old woman.
• She says that murder hand violence has increased since the aliens arrived.
• This again is real life footage that has been repurposed to fit the film.
• The facial expression of the woman shows her frustration about the aliens being here and she thinks that they should not be allowed here. 

Figure 11

• Next, we find out that the aliens have been sucking out the water and electricity from the ground.
• There is a big close-up on the scientist as he says this to put emphasis on it (Figure 12).
• Also, this facial expression shows that he is confused what the aliens are doing.
• This adds enigma because the audience doesn't know what the audience are doing and why they are doing it.

Figure 12

• After this, the scientist says (non-diegetic off-screen dialogue (Figure 13)) "I just hope we will be able to create a standard of living.".
• There is a build up of non-diegetic background music that sounds like is building to a resolution of the problem that they are having, also, it is dramatic music.
• This hits the audience hard with the equality part of his dialogue because it makes the audience think about the key issues of the film which is equality and a good standard of living for any living being.

Figure 13

Genre

• This short film is part of a few different genres:
• Science-Fiction
• Action-Adventure
• Social Realism
• Drama
• Rick Altman's Genre theory can be applied well to this short film:
• His theory is that certain film genre will have typical visual codes which he called semantic codes. 
• The semantic codes in this film are:
• Action-Adventure - Gun, soldier, fast paced editing (lots of cuts in a short space of time).

• Si-Fi - Spaceship, aliens.

• Social Realism - Real topic/issue, real footage that was adapted for this film.

• Drama - dramatic non-diegetic background music.

Short Film on YouTube:

Inspiration (relating this research to my short film):

What in particular you found inspiring, or CREATIVE about the use of the concept in the film?

I liked lots of aspects of this short film and I found lots of parts of it inspiring in different ways.

• The real footage part of the film is very inspiring. This is because it adds meaning to the film because of the social realism genre and it puts more emphasis on the issues because of the re-used footage. Therefore, this inspires me to see if I can implement some repurposed real footage into my short film to put emphasis on the issues or theme of the short film.
• On top of this, I really liked the found footage style of the rest of the short film because it makes the audience think the whole thing is real and really helps the audience sympathise with the characters. Therefore, I am going to see if the shaky camerawork and found footage style of film will fit my short film. Also, it will fit better if I choose to do the social realism genre for my short film.