Pica Towers is a great example of how to tell a visual story without using any words at all.
The Pica Towers trilogy is a wonderful series of short films created by Marc Craste and Studio AKA. As short films go, this little mini-series was probably one of my favorite.
Craste placed the film completed in black and white, giving the whole series a very eerie, dark feel. Without using any words at all (aside from some unrecognizable gibberish uttered by a member of the clergy), the production team at Studio AKA is able to masterfully tell a story and develop characters in a very limited span of time.
There are several excellent reasons to love these short films, but I wanted to touch on one big reason to love it.
Sound Design
As with any good production, sound must be carefully planned and engineered to help tell the whole story effectively. If a producer wants his or her audience fully immersed in the piece, he or she has to have taken the time to master the audio portion of the production. Bad or poorly mastered audio can quickly distract a viewer and dramatically take away from the narrative being told.
Pica towers has wonderful sound design, as is evident in the pizza delivery scene in "Pizza Sangre".
In “Pizza Sangre”, sounds effects are perfectly timed and mastered, giving what is otherwise an alien world a realistic feel that an audience can immerse itself in. The short film opens with a pizza delivery truck approaching a tower to deliver food. As the truck approaches, the viewer can hear muffled music increase in volume as truck continues it approach. When the driver stops and places his vehicle in park, he opens his door and the music immediately receives a boost in loudness and clarity. It might not sound like much, but it’s little things like this that really contribute to the overall feel of the production. Had the audio engineer for this piece opted not to make any changes to the audio when the door opened, a viewer would have immediately recognized something was too foreign about the film. It could have very well ruined the story. Because it was such a seamless transition, most people probably didn’t even notice. That’s one of the primary goals of a good audio engineer. Studio AKA definitely delivered here.