Playing Card Showdown
A dangerous stand-off in a wild west saloon
Ysgol Maes Garmon
Duration: 2:00
Views: 543
Related Experiments
Playing Card ShowdownThis is a very simple trick. If you drop a playing card from about waist height, it'll flutter and tumble and skitter sideways through the air. But if you hold it flat, by its sides, and release it face-down, it never moves quickly enough to start tumbling, so it parachutes down smoothly.
This film started from that trick, and with the simple addition of some cowboy hats it ended up like this. Terrific!
First-time director Joel has made what to me is the most cinematic SciCast film yet. It's masterfully shot, and the actors work hard to deliver performances that are worthy of the photography. Hannah's glower just before the duel commences is particularly brilliant.
It's a deceptively simple idea, but as ever the details are all-important. So the entrances set the tone for the film nicely, with a menacing glare, and the card dropping sequence has all the close-ups needed.
Keeping everything straight when you're filming this sort of thing is hard, though. Keeping peoples' hands in the same places from one shot to the next is the sort of thing professional films employ specific experts to look after. It's also surprisingly hard to keep people looking as if they're facing each other – we flipped one of these shots into a mirror image to help with that. Can you spot which?
That's all detail stuff, though. The only real criticism I have of this film is that I'd have liked to see another round of card dropping, to give me another chance to see what's going on. But that's a fairly minor point.
Final note: the caption cards for this were done in Keynote, which is a presentation package like Powerpoint but that happens to have a really lovely 'old book' style built-in. From Keynote to the edit system – voilà, instant old-film captions!
— Jonathan