0:01 – 0:01

Our focus snaps immediately to a toddler crying, her slightly messy blond hair getting in her face as she kicks up her legs and slams them down as if trying to stomp on the floor but from seated position. The toddler is framed, centered by an unremarkable white hallway that runs into the background with a door ajar at the end of it, an unremarkable long red rug runs the length of the hallway with a common Persian Rug pattern decorating it, which the toddler restlessly throws her tantrum upon. For the first second, the focus is explicitly on the toddler’s very animated face, as she expresses her discontent. At the last moment she looks up and then the video cuts to the next part. Clearly, she is not having a good day, as to what has upset her, we audience do not know. Ethier, we do not need to know, or we will find out in the next part of the video.

0:01 – 0:02

We cut to an image of a father, middle aged perhaps as his hairline is receding, who is looking down at something off screen, presumably the tantrum throwing toddler. The father’s body is slightly obscured by a threshold, as if we are watching him round a corner from a previous room to the hallway we are in, in response to the child’s cries.

0:03 – 0:03

We see the original perspective of the toddler in the center of a hallway, but this time the focal point of the toddler’s face is no longer in distress. The toddler has switched from kicking and screaming to sitting up into a “W” leg position with a look of decision making on her face. There is now calmness washing over the scene. Not calm in a relaxed sense but calm like when a toddler temporarily is distracted; that state which rests on knife’s edge between going back to loud crying or moving  on to being amused and bearable giggling. When we look at what the child is looking at, we see only the father’s arm coming out of the foreground and he is holding a TV remote! A small but important detail is how low and accessible the father’s arm holding the TV remote is in relation to their child. Although the father is offscreen excluding his arm, the arm is extending on a vector so close to the ground, it implies that the father is kneeling or crouching to get on the child’s level and reaching out to them. Clearly this is a situation every parent knows well, as they make their “peace offering” to their child, in exchange the parent will hopefully get to keep their sanity.

4:00 – 4:00

We cut to an entirely different room, perhaps even a different house. An bland white yet recognizable entrance to a house. It is recognizable by the door with an array of nine partitioned windows in the upper part of the door. This is a common door used so people can peer outside. Less than a foot away from the door inside this room is an umbrella resting up against a corner as if someone had left it there to dry and for easy access before leaving. A mother is center frame not far from the door, calling someone’s name, while shuffling though a backpack or bag slung over her right her shoulder. This scene looks like the mother is getting ready for something. Her mouth open for longer than it needs to be while calling a name implies that her call is actually a broadcast to reach every room of the house for its intended recipient. Her positioning near the entrance door implies she is ready to leave. Clearly this is a mother calling for her daughter, as it is time to leave. For school, dance class, or whatever else is not known, but perhaps we do not need to. Between these first two cuts we can start to see a pattern in the making that we are being exposed to moments that every parent can relate to. Hallmarks of parenthood I would call it. Moments such as diffusing a temper tantrum or getting the kids ready for school.

0:05-0:05

We see a playful silly little girl with her nose pressed up against a glass door briefly, until she can contain it no longer and starts laughing. She looks to be around 5 years of age. Her laugh reveals her baby teeth. Her hair is dirty blond; healthy and soft like we all naturally once without products. She dressed colorfully in a teal blue shirt, contrasted with hot pink straps from her backpack. Furthermore, she is wearing a tutu! The tutu includes a reflective patten in its design. Though it is hard to pin down the exact image in sparkles and reflective material, I would venture to say it’s a pattern depicting a flutter of butterflies (Yep, that’s the term for a group of butterflies). This scense shows she is going to school in this fabulous outfit, but on her own time, between being a silly child. The room behind the young girl is unremarkable but we can tell it is a clean and orderly living room/ dining room. We get hints it’s a nice house, not a rich mansion, but her parents make good money in this economy to make their living room and dining room like covers of Good Housekeeping. Off to the side of the door we are viewing the child from, are some house plants they are propped up on a table and also seem unremarkable. This short scene is to elicit joy though a child’s laughter or perhaps nostalgia for parents watching this as they project their own experiences with kids.

0:06 – 0:06

In this cut we can see the girl from 0:05 running towards the mom from 0:04. We see the back of the young girl, her backpack is a sparkly unicorn backpack with prop horse ears and unicorn horn sticking out of the top of the backpack. The young girl does not run in a straight organized line to her mom, but on curved vector to her, playful and happy all the way over.  The mom and the background are blurred but we can see the mom is smiling at her daughter’s playfulness. We can also see that this is the entrance to the house we saw before at 4:00, though the perspective is slightly shifted from last time and the scene is shot slightly further away, backed up far enough that there is some kind of horizontal bar from furniture in our way of getting a clean view. This is purposeful in filmmaking as it can be used in two different ways. The first most common way people see this type of this “peering shot” is in horror movies; imagine a scene where the main character is hiding from the big-bad in a locker, peering through the small slits. We watch from the main character’s limited perspective which builds suspense. The second way “peering shots” can work is to convey a candidness of the shot; think a clothesline scene with many bed sheets hanging, and as the camera on rails moves horizontally, we can see glimpses of people doing laundry between the gaps that rapidly appear and disappear and reemerge again as we pan. This scene is clearly the latter and is to make us feel a candidness. The mom and daughter are about to start their journey to school.

0:07 – 0:08

We see a new (third) family being introduced to us, a father and daughter. Our eyes first jump to a father who is working on something, he is holding a tube. We notice that the man is covered in shadows as the lighting implies the afternoon coming to a close. He wears a black shirt. We take in his surroundings next. We see a little bit of a dark unlit interior of a van in our peripherals; a seatbelt and a handle are distinguishable, its middle side sliding door neatly tucked away to provide us with a centered frame which to view this scene unfold. Our eyes then dart to the blurred background, better lit than the father and this van, is his daughter playing in the backyard. She contrasts her dad’s back shirt and shadowy silhouette with her white shirt and pink suspenders. The back yard is suburban, not much yard, but enough. A wood fence to give privacy from neighbors. A few plants dot along the edges of the yard, but the yard itself appears to be more stonework or masonry, far from the stereotypical lawn people think of 1960s suburbia. The child seems to take advantage of this as we see a sidewalk chalk bucket near her. This scene cleverly frames the daughter using the shadowy silhouettes of the her father on the right and the van frame on the left, while also framing the father using the right and left frames of the van’s door. It is also clever that the director uses a blur on the background because human eyes naturally prioritize gravitating to the brightest color in a picture before looking elsewhere, however in this case by blurring the better lit daughter and having a narrow focus on the dad, we instinctually focus on the dad first before moving on to the background. This is layers on layers of good composition and directing as the dad is shadows is important information for the next scene, like foreshadowing. Although complicated sounding it is just a really good way to condense all the information from three separate scenes into one.

00:9 – 00:9

We take the shot from 0:08 and zoom in, now we are solely focused on the background of the daughter playing in the yard and have cropped out the father and whatever he was doing. The daughter is focused on her sidewalk chalk. Very briefly, we see a shadowy silhouette of the father’s lower body walking by, as if to break our line of sight to girl, as he is walks offscreen to go get something. The girl looks up from her drawling on the ground and takes notice that her dad has walked off. This scene is a set up scene and on its own it doesn’t have much power, until combined with the next.

0:10 – 0:10

We cut to shot almost so low to the ground it is almost on it, and from the perspective of being behind the back right tire of the car. We are doing another peering shot by the way the back tire and the back of the car slightly get in our way and take up nearly half the screen. We want that look of candidness again, of getting caught in the act, as we see the little girl get caught in the act of entering the van. She is 2/3rds of the way into the van when this scene starts with her having her body and one leg in the van and the other on the pavement. By the end of the second this scene last her other leg is brought up into the van.

0:11 – 0:11 We cut to a scene inside the van where we can see the silhouette of the girl press the button to close the van door. The van’s frame is silhouetted still due to the lighting outside. The background is blurred as we do not need to focus on the background. It is not important. These multiple perspective shots of a moment in time are really intricate, but they do not have a flavor yet, there does not feel to be any sense of right or wrong yet as there has been no dialogue or setup for what actions mean, we are simply observing a moment as the viewers as a kid gets into a van. What will happen? What will she do? Will she do something heartwarming or fix the thing dad could not and had to go offscreen for?

0:12 – 0:13

We once again go back to that low ground shot from behind the van and we watch from the outside as the door closes.

0:14 – 0:14

We see a close up of an unrelated red wash bucket brimming with lots of soapy suds, we notice a blurred background with a sun, as to keep our focus on the wash bucket. Nothing happens. Then a few suds drip from the bucket. This nonsensical shot is to show the passage of time, a sort of moment of downtime from the action.

0:15 – 0:16

We see a zoomed-out birds eye view of the yard, and the focus is on the van parked in front of the garage. The focus is also on the fact that nothing is happening, aside from some wooden windchimes slightly in our field of view up high to give us the candid look, but also to show that time is passing as the breeze moves the wooden windchimes. If it were not for the wind chimes slightly moving and a slight shake of the camera, we the audience might think we are looking at a still image. This is once again to show the passage of time.

0:17 – 0:18

We are peering from behind some of the items on a shelf in the garage at the father in the foreground and the blurred van in the background. The father is well lit by lights above him in the garage. We only see him from the chest up, but he appears to be looking down at something. It appears slightly later in the day as the sun has gotten even lower and the background seems to be lit by ambient light more than direct sunlight. The father looks up from whatever he is doing in the garage like he senses something is wrong. He moves his head as fast as a twitch to focus his eyes on the van behind him.

0:18 – 0:21

This is the longest cut in the whole short film. We are now looking at the father from inside the van’s middle seat. Our view is slightly obscured by the insides of the car light the passenger seat in front of us, the consol and dashboard… wait the consol and dashboard? This is a low shot to have a consol and dashboard seem so tall, this shot is to imply the view of someone short, like a child. The father is framed by the front windshield as we see him looking our way from the garage. He looks past us as if scanning the whole yard. After realizing his daughter is not in the yard he looks back a the van a realized his daughter is in the van. The father sprints, camera tracking him from the inside of the van, to the sliding side door. There is a look of “Oh no!” on the mans face as he comes into view of the side door’s window. We the audience are to feel that urgency in this shot.

0:22 – 0:23

A new cut to directly outside of the van at a nice 45 degree angle to see a little bit of the inside of the open van, as the father is urgently pulling his daughter of the van. He is grabbing her under her arms raising her out of the van’s seat and pulling her close to his chest as if to hug.

0:24 – 0:30

Another long cut, to emphasize this moment. The father stares into his daughter’s eyes, he is on his daughter’s level squatting or kneeling is implied. The father is on the left of the screen, his daughter is on the right. Their faces are the focus and their heads and shoulder make up most of the screen space. The father face starts the scene with worry and a hit of sadness as if he were say the classic “You had me so worried, what would I do without you?!”. Text appears layered on top of the scene saying “1 in 4 hot car deaths happen when kids get into cars and can’t get out.” Then the father’s expression changes to half smile like trying to see the bright side of things or forgiving someone, and then changes again to a kiss as he kisses his daughter. As the father kissed his daughter’s cheek, new text appears over the image: “Prevent hot car deaths.” and an icon of a child raising their hand in a car’s rearview mirror in a cartoonish style appears alongside of the text. This is the emotional banger, bringing the beacon, the lead, the breadwinner, the scene that should have you feeling your feels. The actor playing the father does a lot in just a few emotions. All those other scenes where not much is happening leading up to this have been rather bland or hyper focused on one thing from different angles. This is the payoff, as we finally understand the meaning of the video! We feel the gasp or relief that is conveyed in the father’s emotions. We are being taught to take a second look around to make sure that we get our kids out of hot cars.