Good Vibrations

Good Vibrations is a short film by French illustrator and director Jérémy Clapin that makes great use of directions, varying shot sizes and camera height to build space and play with ellipsis, expectations and off-screen space. He uses the first shots from the film to quickly create this space and establish the relationship between the locations of the different characters (the bird is used to link these different places).

After this is done, he fragments the space by reducing the shot size, passing information in a partial or indirect way (sometimes he also uses camera shakes or sound to replace the image). The author uses ellipsis and parallel editing to create a scene of a spectacle with a stage and an audience. The increasing number of characters helps multiply the effect of what is seen, acting as a kind of sound box.

It’s also worth noting how he conceals information from certain characters, playing with the expectations of the viewers of the film (i.e. for ex., when he makes the old man approach the moving tile, without him knowing it’s loose and shaky).

Good Vibrations was a project commissioned by Liberty Mutual for its “The Responsibility Project”, and was produced at Vanilla Seed by a team of artists and animators.