Jian

Ellis is one of the most successful songwriter/producers/musical directors in the UK. Simon graduated from Nottingham Trent University in 1995, specialising in Fine Art Photography. On the begging of his career, his works are all short films but afterward he also joined the music industry. He was the musical director for Britney Spears' record-breaking world tour, “Circus”, her "Femme Fatale" 2011-world tour and West life’s "Gravity" 2011 world tour.

Most of his short films are about real life, which give a message to the audiences about different types of society also to tell you by doing those things how you would affects others people’s life.

Soft is a drama film, one of his most popular short film, that short film is about a teenage boy got bullied by a gang and the victim’s father is coward, the father thinks by doing nothing the problem will be solve but the son proved that you need to do something to solve problems.

The film is based on a local living area where there are two kinds of social people, one of them is a medium class and the other is a low class. The medium class is the protagonist’s family; they wear clear cloth, organised house, the father seems to work in an office because he wears a suit with a suitcase and they have a good car.The low class is the villain (the gang), they have bad education, the way they speak is very rude and they use slangs, one of them suspended from school at age 15, they have nothing to do apart from messing around on the street, which lead them to a miserable life. They look like chavs by the cloth they wear.

In my view of this film, I think it is very informative and open viewed. By open viewed, what I mean is that the film is not only focusing on the characters and the story, what I could also see apart from the characters is the society and the environment, which made me feel like this is not just a film that it is something that actually happened in the real world.

I would rate this film 4/10 because the logic of this film is somehow stupid. I would rate it 10/10 if it was a fantasy or action because I think in that kind of situation, those nonviolence fathers normally would call the police, I know that drama should be dramatic but they are over doing it which I think is a bad thing for a realistic drama film as this one.Well that was my opinion but I also got opinions from others audiences who watched this video online:

simbafreak:well to be fair, the father cant do much. a grown man beating up a 15 year old will not look good in a court, no matter how troublesome the kid is/was. its still going to look bad and the the kid can play the, 'i was only jokin' card' and the jury would eat that shit up. whilst if it was the son, its just a fight, "innit"?

Rendezvous:A powerful, dramatic short about a subject that all of us know in one form or another.

NakedCrusaders:Great composition. The editing is perfect. It dictates the pace, not dictated by it. Great work.

Jian

Telling lies is also a very interesting work from Simon Ellis. The story is about a couple broke up for certain reasons. The style of this film is very interesting because it is not like any other film with motion videos. This film is more like picture drama because it only has text and voice over. To make a film like this, you need lots efforts and imagination to make the audiences to understand the story. Some of the text doesn’t match the voice because that’s when they lie, as you can see the faces of their expression they made the them speak fast with low voice and the texts smaller so the audiences can imagine a picture that they are telling lies.I would rate this film 8/10 because it has creativity and good story Here are comments of others audiences:

Jordan Chesney Plus I love this short. Great writing, great casting, great performances, and really well executed. Great work as usual.

Hernan Canto Very clever. I liked the idea, it was a bit too fast for me, but its really fun! I enjoyed it.

Sean Kobi Sandoval wow what an extremely brilliant and creative concept!

I think the film Soft is for all kind of audiences but telling lies is mostly for people who know English because the video is all texts and if you add subs to it will be like double subs and it will be hard to read. You will need to keep pressing pause / play and that is an annoying way of watching a film.

The budge of Soft (£50,000 estimated) is way much more than telling lies (£?) because to film Soft you will need to hire equipment, location fees, cameraman, etc… in the other hand telling lies, just need voice overs and editors.