Martyn - Research: Analysis of a short film: Warning / Error

I decided to study a short film to get a better understanding for the areas of which my group may want to explore and as the rest of the group is going to look into professionally made / award winning shorts i shall look towards the ametuer area, just to get a better understanding of how it may be for our project.


I during my research i stumbled across an internet company called Roosterteeth, which is based at http://roosterteeth.com/home.php , who make short films to fit a mostly specific audience, mostly in the computer gaming community, and to a certain degree the shorts made do have a deep meaning if one looks deep enough into the film. The series of short films can be found on their own website roosterteeth.com and Youtube.com, and can also be embedded in other webpages such as Facebook and Twitter. This particular one is Warning/Error, it is based partly on the advances in technology and the social fears that occur, professional hollywood disaster films and the effects of internet security. It follows the basis of a comedy, albeit only 4:41 in length giving jokes and one-liners throughout.

 Roosterteeth has not won any awards for their films as they are not a company set out on becoming award winning short film producers, it is an ametuer company making ametuer shorts for an ametuer audience, all benefits for the film are for the general public and is funded by a collection of sponsors supporting their work through subscriptions to the sites special features.

The synopsis is a simple but effective one, the characters are working on their respective projects when one stumbles across a computer problem, he then asks his collegue for assistance, who takes a look at the problem when the computer becomes self aware, obviously following the basic movie plot of it wanting to destroy the world, what makes it different is the chemistry between the characters and when another person walks on-set we discover that it may not be a legitimate crisis, this is done with the shot techniques that reveal enough from one perspective but once the connection has been made in the mind it reveals so much more on a psychological level.

 The audience targeted for this short is a really diverse one as it could appeal to all within the computer games community and any who find it funny, but if i were to put it into a category i would select teenagers to young adults seeing how childish, yet adult also, the film seems to be and the way it is distributed.