Hound

 Note 

This film will be of most interest to filmmakers due to the way it plays with editing. It’s great for casual viewers, too, but some may be left scratching their heads.

Hound is a short film created by Olivia Blanc and Marion Delpech as their graduation project for French animation school EMCA.

Hound offers a revision of cinema’s traditional chase scene through an exercise in editing. Using cross-cutting (parallel editing), it creates the impression of a chase sequence by mixing shots from different parts of the timeline of a linear narrative, making them appear as if they were happening at the same time and splitting one character into two (a technique similar to the one used in Jan Pinkava’s “Geri’s Game” – though in the later case it was meant to be explicit, while in Hound the effect is intended to be concealed until the end).

One of the key elements used for achieving this effect is directions in the frame, with the sequences showing the character(s) moving in most cases towards the right of the frame.

Highlights of the short include the wonderfully stylized aesthetics and saturated colors, elaborate textures, the use of extreme close-ups for stressing emotions, light and shadows to create off-screen space for suspense, and the sound design by Florian Calmer that helps build an atmosphere of tension and create continuity.