2 Experimental and Drama short film reactions

Joe King/Rosie Pedlow - Strange Lights - 2010 - I felt very split regarding this short, one part agrees that the time-lapse footage shot portrayed a highly serene and beautiful night sky that provokes within the viewer an element of mystery in a relatively effective manner (through its use of parallel sound also, beeps and noises occurring in place of quick glimpses of car lights). The second part of me has seen far too many time-lapse footage and found this to be yet another variation upon a gimmick typically used for the exact same reasons, to evoke a sense of peacefulness in similar fashion, for a nondescript reason. i.e. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFpeM3fxJoQ.

Conor McCormack - Christmas with dad - 2008 - This short follows the life of a very working-class family over Christmas and focused mainly on the father figure within this unit. Because it was set at Christmas, I felt, this let the viewer identify with the problems presented as they were very generalisable(not buying enough presents, here quite ironically); but more importantly (and this goes for most documentary/drama shorts) I still retain the fact that the hand-held camera should not be a symbol of realism, especially whilst it also tries to create an empathy for the characters; creating what I feel is a highly contradictory feeling, presenting information about the characters from a realist point of view but then positioning us to feel for them. However, I highly enjoyed how it led us into believing our pre-conceived notions about such a family, with establishing shots showing a downtrodden council estate and then later showing us how much of a 'nice-guy' the father was, raising children not his own whilst battling possible blindness; I enjoyed it because it made us question something we thought sure about, without explicitly posing a question to us. Something I believe cinema should always do, no exceptions.