The Treasure of Riverside Park

http://www.thirteen.org/sites/reel13/shorts/short-treasure-of-riverside-park/2301/

The Treasure of Riverside Park is a black-and-white short film that focuses on how ones misfortune can lead to another man 's treasure. One of the challenges of filming with absence of diegetic sound is conveying to the audience the message your trying to express. With that comes the acting in terms of how they express their emotions with no dialogue. This tests the actor's true ability as it focus more on the body language the actor uses to express what he/she is feeling. With the short time and no audio, this film does a great job of expressing a clear message to it's audience. The director also shows a diversity of classicism in the shot where the homeless man passing the wealthy man on the bench which really caught my eye. Also the use of black of white, in my mind, adds to this in that black and white are two different colors as are both the wealthy man and the homeless man. I enjoyed the simplicity of the score and how it transcends to a horror feel when the man enters with the knife. From my interpretation, I see that throughout the film, the diamond ring loses it's meaning due to the actions from the upset husband. So essentially, the diamond ring becomes a symbol of hope for the homeless man at the end indicated by the smile of his face. I think when your using a dolly, which this film does many times, your camera movement should be fluid and smooth. In this case, some of the dolly shots should have been either put on a smoother surface or not even put at all. Reason being, unless the shakiness of a shot is the intention of the director to capture realism and suspense, i.e. The Bourne Supremacy, than the camera should be still especially when the tone throughout this film was very simple. Overall, I really enjoyed the simplicity of the film, almost like seeing a French film, and that fact that it was able to express a great deal of ambiguity with removal of audio.