Reel-Unreel

     Reel/Unreel was an interesting and slightly peculiar short film to watch. It's centered around a game (a race maybe?) between two children, each rolling a reel of film through the streets of Kabul. The kids start on a mountain or hill overlooking the city, many of the opening shots show scenic views of the city, which are abandoned as the two boys enter the city proper. At the end of the video the boys return to mountain, and as they climb the wide shots of Kabul start to return, which makes me think that the city is as much a focus of the video as the two boys. The tracking shots of the boys racing through the city are interspersed with (often) still shots of various locations and character's in the city, which reinforces my feeling that Kabul the city is of just as much significance to the film. As mentioned earlier, the illusion of continuity is maintained by the constant over the shoulder tracking shots of the two boys, as well as by the occasional shot that they both appear in together. Another detail that might seem sort of obvious is the fact that boys start descending the mountain and end ascending it, which pretty strongly implies a linear timeline. 

    Color wise, something that I really enjoyed about this short film was the fact that the color scheme felt honest. In a lot of bigger budget movies that take place in more arid and less developed parts of the world, like Mexico or Afghanistan, the cameras are pretty frequently color corrected to exaggerate the yellow and beige tones. It was a breath of fresh air that this film didn't do that, and that choice also helped some of the brighter colors to shine through and catch the eye. Lastly the sound was quite measured and used selectively in Reel/Unreel. There was no dialogue, no characters were formally introduced. The only real sound paletes were the two boys rolling their reels of film, and ambient sound of life in Kabul, like car engines and goats.  The conservative use of sound deliberately made me feel like the two "characters" of the film were the boys and the city. The sound of the rolling film reels was hypnotic, and made me feel like the boys were in a flow state; lost in their own world. The ambient city sounds made me feel like the Kabul was a character of its own.