File:The Body sound and silence.ogv

Clip from "The Body", season 5 episode 16. Buffy finds her mother dead and in her shock, vomits on the floor and goes outside for fresh air.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Complete Fifth Season (2008), 20th Century Fox Self-made video using HandBrake, QuickTime Pro, and OggConvert conversion and transcoding tools [Chapter 4, 16:15–17:15]

The Body (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Entire image (2.35:1 aspect ratio) to preserve the episode's cinematography and avoid misrepresenting the work in any way.

Low: the video has been compressed and downscaled to 300 × 170 pixels, less than .1 megapixels in size for each frame, downgraded from the original resolution of anamorphic 853 x 480 pixels. Assuming a frame rate of 24p, the 32 seconds contained in this video contains roughly 768 frames out of a total of roughly 61200—1.25 percent of the total motion picture. The file has been encoded three times and the video has been compressed to a bit rate of roughly 1.9 MBps, much less than the source file, as well as a reduction in audio bit rate. Copies made from this video will be inferior to the original DVD, preserving commercial opportunities, and unsuitable for illegal uses being such a small portion of the film.

The clip is used to illustrate the use hyperrealistic sound and silence in the episode, which was notable to critics and scholars for portraying a very authentic reaction to the death of a close family member, particularly for a television series that usually focused in the fantasy/horror genre. Simple details were accentuated in the episode to express an "unlovely physicality" in the minutes and hours following the discovery that Buffy's mother had died. Joss Whedon intended to show the isolation and boredom involved in the experience. As such, the clip has been noted by many critics and scholars for its sound effects. The camera focuses on the breeze through the wind chimes. Buffy's overexposed face appears in the doorway as she listens to sounds of life carrying on in her neighborhood, which contrast with the silence surrounding her mother's body in her living room. Although these issues are cited and discussed in the article, it is impossible for readers to understand the full context of the scene without an audio-visual representation of it.

This video's publisher has not released any free images or made shots from the film available under a compatible license. There are no known shots that are of a free license and could adequately replace this one.

© 2008 20th Century Fox; use of the video in the article complies with Wikipedia non-free content policy and fair use under United States copyright law as described above.