Review 3 - CGI Film Review

The CGI short film that I have chosen to review is Portal No Escape which was produced by Cathleen Alexander, Stephen Hens, and Ashley Adams. The very first thing that got my attention when I watched this was the setting of the film and the character. There is a woman in what is a small room surrounded by walls with seemingly no door and no windows. It made me wonder why this woman is in this place and what happened prior to this event. The thing that made me the most interested in watching was how when the main character broke out of the room with a portal gun was the depth of the portal. The portals seemed to go on forever and appeared to be surrounded by a ring a fire and ice, two different materials, that added to the depth and how interesting they looked. The role of technology in this film is to make the viewer think that the portals are real so people believe that it is possible and will wonder where the person is going to end up. Then towards the endthe main character reaches what appears to be the end of the city and then punches it making the viewer realize that there is something beyond. The job of technology with that is to make the viewer understand that there is wall or barrier that can broken down and it should make the viewer wonder what is beyond there and want to know what the woman is going to discover.

One of the most impressive scenes was when the main character was escaping the facility she was being contained it by use of the portal gun. This was interesting because she would run into one portal and out of another to get across building and prevent herself from falling onto the group from the top of a building. There was lots of action and movement in this sequence because the main character was fighting with everything she had to get out of this place and to get away from the people who were holding her captive. In this scene there were multiple portals being created that the woman was jumping through and you never knew when she was going to create another one to continue on her great escape. In this sequence technology was used to create the portals that she was running through in order to escape the guards. She would run through a portal that she had shot in one direction before leaping out of another farther away from the guards.

Then the other impressive scene was the very ending scene when the woman reaches what to be land that goes for ages. She then realizes that it isn't true and instead it is a wall with an image projected onto it. Then instead there is something behind the wall that appears to be the inside of a building. The woman however doesn't know this and just knows that there is something behind the wall that she needs to see. To try to do this she decides to punch the wall and the image on it's surfaces ripples like it's under water. The image also seemed to bend under the impact and it become frazzled and sounded like there was static. Technology in this scene created the rippling wave effect when the  woman hit the barrier. It created how the wall reacted to impact and how the image looked like it was temporarily failing.

The mood in this film is suspense and action. At the beginning this was created by having a dark room with almost nothing happening so the viewer doesn't know what's going on or why it is happening. Later it was created when the woman was trying to escape, there was lots of moving. It was suspenseful because the viewer doesn't know of the woman is going to make it out alive or what was going to happen if she ended up being caught. The other feeling in here was perseverance and hope, the woman worked to get stronger everyday to try to escape her room. She never gave up hope that there was a way to get out and she never once gave in and surrendered from her escape.

Overall I thought that this was a really nice film. It was unique, interesting and different from things that I have seen in the past. I thought that technology was used very nicely in this film and added to the plot of the story rather than detracted from it. The technology was what added to and carried the plot along. Without the main character's use of the portal gun she would have never been able toe escape and create a story. The benefits of using technology is it allows producers to capture images and emotions from characters instead of having to animate them. It allows people to create movies and films that have things that might not exist in real life and be able to believe that it is actually happening in the film.