Audio Tour

Audio tour is a highly narrative driven film about a woman that takes an audio tour around a museum only to find that the headphones gives her a visual description of everything she sees even if it isn’t part of the museum, this only escalates when she flees the museum and forgets to return the headphones. The film concludes with the girl looking at her reflection and having the headphones comment on how she hasn’t fulfilled any of her dreams and is “Quite forgettable really”. The film is quite bittersweet in the delivery of its ending, although most people I spoke to after seeing this film wrote it off as a rather sad and somewhat harsh ending, I believe that’s because many of them were so moved by how sad the character looked as the description went on few of them heard the headphones final words moments before the film ended which were ‘It’s a shame really’ which suggests that her character is actually quite special and memorable it’s just her attitude and outlook that is preventing people from seeing that.

Technically the film was rather simple with no really difficult camera techniques or sound design, there were a few handheld shots designed to look like a first person POV which worked really well and fitted her somewhat erratic behaviour at that point in time. The majority of the sound comes from a voice over narrative, which was interesting to see how it worked as we are thinking of doing a similar thing in our film and it will be my job to record the voice over. Unlike our idea though there is next to no other sounds in the film, which I think works against it as there is something a little off with not being able to hear things that the audience can see going on around the characters at the same time this could also be done to simulate the idea of the headphones blocking out the sound, which would fit how the voiceover gets quieter at the end when she takes them off.

Overall I liked Audio tour it was a simple and effective film that had a rather interesting idea and created a surprising amount of care for the character although she never really does or says anything in the film. It conveys a sweet idea at the end of harsh realities being caused by people’s outlooks and how they really are special if they change their outlook and gain more self confidence in their abilities.