Film Review: ‘Telling Lies’ (2000) – Simon Ellis

Title Screen from 'Telling Lies' (2000)
Directed by Simon Ellis

'Telling Lies’ is a short experimental film directed by Simon Ellis in 2000 and was nominated for the ‘Audience Award’ at both the ‘Hamburg International Short Film Festival 2001’, and the ‘Bitfilm Festival, Hamburg 2001’. ‘Telling Lies’ has been described as “...a humorous and syntactically inventive animation” by Resfest, which is an American film festival that started in 1996 and stopped in 2006. ‘Telling Lies’ shows a sequence of catastrophic phone calls that ruins the day of a young man named Phil.

I find this experimental short film extremely interesting as it uses the use of dialect and ambient sound to create a visual story in your mind and visually tells the story in captions. This is a very interesting concept as it uses colour coordination for each character to help define who is speaking, as well as using white to show what the character is really thinking. For example, when Phil says “No” to his mother, the text says “Yes” in white. This is clever as it gives the audience a sense of sarcasm and emotion to the dialect, which is backed up by the use of size when a word is emphasised and follows the beat of the syllables in each word.

I personally think this is a humorous and genius of use of typography, sound and dialect to create a clear image for the film by not showing any footage at all. This short film is executed extremely well and has inspired my idea for future short films.

Bibliography:

• Anon. (2000). Telling Lies (2000) [online]. Simonellisfilms.com. [last Accessed: 01/11/15 ]. URL: http://simonellisfilms.com/tellinglies.html
  
  
• Anon. (2015). RESFest [online]. en.wikipedia.org. [Last Accessed: 01/11/15]. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RESFest