Oyin Balogun

I will be analysing 28days later.

Question: How do the lighting, editing, camera work, music and setting create suspense?

28days later was set in London, Central London to be precise. Central London is a busy place, people work, people are shopping or people are simply just out and about, but in this case, we were shown Central London in a different aspect. It was empty and deserted, not a soul in sight. This was strange for us, because we know that this is not how Central London normally is but for anyone who has never been to Central London, they’d probably think that it’s normal. But because we know that it’s never quiet, we were already expecting something to happen. Also in 28days later there’s a scene where this one man is in the hospital. It wasn’t an ordinary hospital, it was deserted and very untidy which is the complete opposite to what a hospital is supposed to look like. Everywhere was dismantled, phone chords hanging, vending machines broken, papers scattered and wheel-chairs tipped over. This already freaked us out because all we were left to do was wonder, wonder what happened to all these people and where they had gone.

The camera shots and angles really toyed with us. Through out the entire clip that was shown to us, the camera never stop following the man. As well as following him it also never stops portraying the man to be small and clueless to what exactly is taking place.

The whole clip went slow, which was emphasised by a slow pan following the man and his every movement. The use of zoom in and zoom outs also let us know that something has happened, e.g. in the hospital scene the camera took a zoom in to the hanging telephone chords to obviously inform us that people were trying to call for help, which lets us know that it must have been really bad because they were already in a hospital, so what more help could they have possibly needed.

There wasn’t that much music involved within the clips, surely but slowly a very slow paced music was bought in to emphasise the stillness and slowness of the scene which caused more suspense within the audience. Nothing spectacular really happened with the lighting, whatever the time of day it would show because that’s all it was, daylight.