From what I gathered from the earlier Hillman Curtis videos on Artists, I could tell that they have a high level of quality that is put into shooting the films and equally high in how the video comes out.
It is interesting to see the variety of shots used in the videos. “Spinal Tap” uses mostly close in shots to help give a more intimate feel to the scene. Watching “Spinal Tap” reminds me of watching My Dinner with Andre because of the close-in shots and rarely having shots that do not solely feature the two main characters. These shots along with the very informal script gives a feeling of watching two friends having a conversation rather than watching something that feels very structured and forced.
The bookstore musical was interesting because it blends black and white regular scenes with color musical numbers. The transitions do help delineate what is a musical trope and what isn’t, but at the end, it leaves you hanging about what actually happened. Normally, I would like to have a bit of room to think through the events of the musical, but in this case, it is so short I want to be told what is going on. This is the problem with short narratives, you either leave out too much or not enough.
I think this is what the take home point was for me: when looking at a short piece, one has to strip out what is not necessary but leave enough in to give a sense of what is going on and where it is all heading. The balance between being in media res and leaving questions for the audience can be difficult but accomplished even in a short amount of time. Think about it, commercials do it all the time.