Textual analysis of short film: ABE

The short film called 'ABE' is about a robot who is built to 'love' and 'fix' humans.

The short film starts off with a dark, low lit scene with mysterious and eerie non diegetic music, which slowly zooms into a chain with fresh, water-like blood on it with a slow dolly shot. The blood connotes death and warning, and the fact that the blood is fresh connotes that the incident has happened recently. This allows the audience to immediately identify the film as the horror genre, as blood and darkness is the common conventional code used in horror movies, and also the killings happen pretty fast.

The image of the chain jump cuts to a handheld shot of a woman with silver tape around her mouth behind the plastic curtains, and immediately the audience will think she's dead. This creates a crescendo in climax, as we think we are about to witness something worse than this, as presumably we have already seen a dead woman. This is the director's intent for the audience to think this. This creates an active audience as we would think 'what will happen next, how did she die, who killed her? and so on' instead of passively watching the movie.

Just as the butterfly flutters away in the next shot, there is a pull focus from the butterfly to the woman's eyes fluttering open too, connoting that she is like an insect, like a bug, like an animal that humans like to test on. She opens her eyes realising where she is and tries to struggle her way out of being taped down. The conventional scream for help occurs with a high angle shot, showing us that there is dissecting equipment with blood n the tissue, maybe she has been operated on.

The woman's hair is a muddy blonde/ brown creating on of Propp's 8 characters- the princess, or the damsel in distress? This woman needs saving. The robot's mechanic footsteps are heard whilst the camera displays it's dark and skinny shadow.
The robot enters as the villain who is kind at first, asking if she is comfortable. This allows the first impression of the audience to be 'he's friendly and he can't possibly harm her' - but little do they know.
The robot says 'let us begin' like he is about to perform an operation whilst he picks up the dissecting equipment. It is shown with a handheld shot. This connotes that the robot has to experiment on humans like humans experiment on animals. This creates a sense of falseness as humans would think this will never happen to them, whereas scientists could think that in 50 years time the world would be run by robots. This is further backed up by when there is a high angle shot of the butterfly flying and he just kills it with a single slice in the air. This connotes that he will do this to the woman he has kidnapped. Additionally the sound links to the scene when he says human desires can all end in the "blink of an eye", with the diegetic sound of a slice in the air as he cut the butterfly without looking. This foreshadows the woman's death as she is being represented like a beautiful butterfly.

There is a close up of the woman's eyes for about 8 seconds to show us how she feels, the fear inside her and how the only image in her eyes is the robot.

There is a close up of the robot's hands with only 4 fingers on each hand as he says no body is perfect and if the humans don't love him then he tries to fix them, just as they tried to fix him. The woman's tears roll down, connoting sympathy for the robot.
He picks up the scissors  and the saw/knife and tells her that maybe this time he will get it right and fix her to make her love him.
The scene cuts back to the first scene but this time she screams and there is blood splattered on the curtain until the screaming stops.  This represents the gore of horror and identifies it as a horror film.

The next shot jump cuts to a lovely sunny day with a slow motioned shot of a woman flicking her hair. The robot says 'I wish I could stop bleeding' while this scene goes on which connotes that he is in actual love with a female human and that she could be his next potential victim, as he connotes that falling in love can make you do crazy things.