Pink Feldspar: Creepy Tom, Part 2 (400 Days)

Had a quick 5 minutes this morning before sunrise and making weekend breakfast, so here we go with another slow creep through Creepy Tom. Quick catch up. At this point we're getting visual clues how the people in the possibly displaced ghost town are surviving as Theo is lurking around in the diner kitchen.

There you go, this kind of nails what's really going on. But remember, at this point we still don't know if this is part of the role play for the 400 days of experimental psychological stress survival. This could all be a set up.

Right after that scene, Theo turned a corner and accidentally ran into a cook with a knife and she was so shocked that it slid right into him that she gasped how sorry she was and fled. So- still part of the role play and they're supposed to just stay in character? It apparently wasn't a fatal wound.

The tension ramps up as we get confirmation that Zell does appear to be the ringleader of the surviving town folk. Remember, Zell didn't originally own the diner, but pretends to now with a woman he calls his wife who says she's not his wife. He's obviously the meanest one in town to be this controlling in a really bad survival situation.

And we get what looks like up close confirmation about how weird this situation is, a seeming ghost town somehow scooped up onto the moon or walled off and made to look like it's on the moon or whatever. Psychologically upsetting enough and then you add in the danger of possibly being hunted as food.

Crapola, Zell has found their 'ship' entrance. Remember, the experiment is underground in a bunker made to mimic being inside a spaceship.

Crappy zoom, lol. Sorry about all the blue, but phones do that unless you really get into the camera settings. I'm lazy. He's not really blue on the DVD.

Inside the 'ship', the hunt begins in earnest. By the way, this is the first we see Zell in this bomber jacket, in all the previous scenes before the hunt started, he's in a muscle shirt. We have earlier indications that it's chilly 'outside', but in the diner I'm guessing the kitchen stoves kept the building a little warmer. They're pretty consistent with their believable effects in this movie. The bomber looks a little big on Zell (Tom is 6 feet tall), so whoever it belonged to was conceivably allegedly (by insinuation as we continue viewing) dragged down by the hunt club Zell started. Visual cues like this lend loads to quality filming.

Like a bloodhound, methodical, quiet, patient.

Maybe a little malnourished, and we already suspect slight oxygen deprivation. Probably very hungry and bored enough from months of stale living to completely immerse and invest himself into this hunt. If this is still role play for the 400 day experiment, it's really good role play since the targets aren't even in sight.

And he's enjoying this a bit.

If you feel intrigued by filming but never took classes and don't have the time for online researching other people's film studies, you can play with this on your own tech while you watch TV. When I started my own film study blog years ago (original site started 2005), I started with a crap phone and a crap TV. Tech is so much better nowadays, phones and TVs are now higher quality at cheaper prices that we ever had in the past, making this really easy. Everything being digital means you can take 100 screenshots and see them instantly and then delete them out of your way just as quickly.

Also on your phone, most of you will have editing options. If a scene is being ornery, you can do upright or portrait shots, then trim out any excess. Sometimes films are atrociously obnoxious for tech-to-tech screenshotting between the fast cutaway scenes, the weird TV glow, the even weirder wavy light lines that we don't see with our eyes during regular TV watching, and however cantankerous your phone settings might be. I used to really fight with it, now I'm just meh. If you want a perfect screenshot, you need DVD player software in an HD laptop and then screencap controls on the side. I used to do that, it was wonderful, and then W10 decided I need to pay for DVD software to access the built in DVD player and I was like you turds...- NO. I refuse. 😂😂😂 So I'm slinging out crap phone shots. 😁 I have the money, I'm just stubborn that way. Rebellious. I'm a loner, Dottie. A rebel.

Film studies can include set design, makeup and costuming, actor spotting, storyboarding, and any number of specific interest focus items, whatever you feel drawn to. The easiest way to do film studies at home is to simply watch a film and point your phone at the TV and take pictures. You can use the pause button to freeze and advance frame by frame for fast cutaway scenes, which are often so fast that your mind sees faster than your eyes and you only saw something for a split second. It's amazing what the brain can pick up while we watch TV. Having used frame advance across hundreds of films over nearly two decades, I've been amazed how cleverly stories can meld into our minds with the most fleeting insinuations in backgrounds, the tiniest clues on costuming. We are all brain trained to pick things up so quickly now that we become bored with 'slow' films sharing very little actual interpretive information. We are media encultured to respond to visual cues we don't even know we see.

Yes, I wrestled my tech over this one.

Having said that, I don't believe there is anything sinister behind 400 Days as a film entity. 😂 I'm not a film conspiracy theorist, for the most part. I just point out what I find in my own film studies.

Since we are doing a Creepy Tom watch, we're focusing on the character Zell almost exclusively in this writeup, so if you want to know more about this particular movie, search for 400 Days online and find reviews. I'm not here to do a recap or review of the whole movie right now. I'm also not here to grade Tom's work, simply to enjoy it. 😊 If you guys want to use these screencaps for anything, I'm fine with it, I don't care whether you source or link back or not because it's not really my material. I just snapped pix of my TV on my phone. See the disclaimer in my previous post for fair use in film studies.