Author: gianni_avilan

Here it is! The audio is better balanced now, and a few sequences have been moved around/one was added.

Have a great winter break, everyone!

I fed the AI a prompt, asking it to animate a short, 60-minute clip of a man riding the bus, listening to music, and traveling to his job at a bookshop.

Planning to tighten up the edit slightly, if needed, add music, clean up sound/add SFX, and polish the VHS VFX.

In the documentary Devil’s Playground, Lucy Walker explores deep questions of faith, belief, and individuality.

In terms of visual evidence, we have a great deal to draw on — Walker includes authentic footage of Amish life and so-called “English” life in spades, with some exceptions whose authenticity is shaky.

The majority of the documentary centers around Faron, a young man whose extended rumspringa has gone very, very wrong; involving him in the sale and consumption of controlled substances and, as such, putting him on the wrong side of law.

Given the sensational nature of Faron’s story, it’s understandable why Walker chooses to give him and the visual evidence surrounding his journey the most screen time — after all, a documentary can only reach those who choose to watch it, and Walker does a good job of drawing viewers by juxtaposing the wild, chaotic nature of rumspringa with the quiet, laconic rhythms of ultra-conservative Amish life.

To me, the story of Velda, a young woman who chooses to leave the Amish faith at the cost of being shunned by her family and community, contains the most promise. Though Faron’s story shows one dimension of the issue examined here, I think equal screen time could have been devoted to Velda, whose surrounding visual evidence, though likely less sensational than Faron’s, would have stood out as a measured and mature path away from the Amish faith.

In Light Is Waiting, the very first thing we notice is how dated the footage looks — this is accomplished with digital effects (presumably). On cathode ray televisions, the picture was formed by an electron gun that traced lines across the television screen faster than the human eye can see. This causes small lines to appear on the screen when there is a lot of motion, which can be approximated with a digital raster effect (this is what we see here.)

A more extreme version of this, with a flickering effect, is then scene when the TV is dropped in the next scene.

From here, we see a quick succession of extreme digital effects applied to give the impression of a dreamlike, hallucinatory sequence. A man jumping from the top of a waterfall is shown in a mirror effect, with the screen reflected across the center.

Two scenes, one with the opacity lowered, are superimposed on one another, giving the impression of ghostly trees hovering out of view.

Red, blue, and green (these are the component colors of a CRT television’s picture) tints are applied to some scenes, flipping back and forth rapidly.

In total, the digital effects used here serve the overarching feel of the short, summoning the nostalgia inherent to the VHS/CRT era and infusing it with a psychedelic, unsettling undertone.

In the assigned scene, we watch the Gallagher family discuss plans around the breakfast table, while learning about their socioeconomic standing and unique family dynamics.

Mylod, the director for this sequence, shifts between tracking his subjects with pans and cutting between them. Throughout, we maintain a clear sense of space. For example, at the start of the scene, we track motion from the bedrooms to the kitchen in a single cut; however, we maintain focus on the same character.

Following that, we track the gallon of milk, which moves from the refrigerator to the table, to connect the two locations. Given the chaotic nature of the scene, it’s important that Mylod gives us a clear sense of space that allows us to focus on the dynamics of the family (arguably the most important part of the scene).

In the railroad crossing scene, our protagonist is caught between a rock and a hard place (or a truck and a hard place, perhaps). As the driver of the enormous, Goliath-esque vehicle that looms over our David throughout the film pushes its prey ever closer to the train that barrels down the tracks, Spielberg is careful to stay on one side of the action; the right side, to be exact, of the 180-degree rule. Though he occasionally pushes to the extremes of this range, remaining within the “allowed” space lets the audience better absorb the quick cuts and frantic energy of this fast-paced scene, without losing track of the respective locations and arrangement of the vehicles.

Mixed within cuts to and from the two vehicles, pushing in on the protagonists face and cutting to longer, more expansive shots, we even find a POV shot in the mix, as David jams his foot on the brake from inside the vehicle.

In this scene in particular, I’m interested in how the two vehicles are shot as if a conversation were taking place; in particular, there is the unmistakable rhythm of shot-reverse shot in the push and pull between David’s small red car and the hulking truck on his tail.

In summary, Spielberg’s admixture of quick, variegated framing and attention to continuity allows the audience to feel the tension and horror of the events without ever losing track of the space, and treating the vehicles as their own “characters”, so to speak, serves to amplifies the film’s themes.