i think what is more ironic is we dont have a huge black population in my country, and defiantly not a black american community so we were going off pop culture stereo types, no one really seemed to mind
This was pretty much my assumption while watching. Honestly the film comes off as somewhat naive - I didn't get the impression that you were trying to be deliberately offensive, just that you weren't really aware of what you were doing.
yeah well to uptight types maybe (...) i hardly think its offensive, its comedy.
That's the thing about it though - you get to choose whether or not to try and offend people, you don't get to choose whether or not someone gets offended.
If your goal is to offend people - great! That's a perfectly legitimate choice, and a lot of filmmakers and other artists make that choice consciously and with awareness and acceptance of the possible consequences.
But if your goal isn't to offend people, and people are offended - then you've got to accept that and decide whether you're ok with it. You can't simply dismiss them by saying 'I don't think it's offensive' - because that's not the question. It's whether other people find it offensive - if they do, then it is, by definition, offensive, to at least a portion of your audience. Now you have to decide if you're ok with it being offensive.
where the fried chicken joke was meant to come off ironic being that the guy in black face was offended by it.
I got that. It was the one moment in the film where the racial stereotypes were used in a way that didn't just involve laughing directly at them. It also totally blows the idea that you weren't aware that these stereotypes would be offensive - because the joke itself is only ironic if the audience knows that blackface is offensive.
On it's own that joke might work because of it's self awareness, but in the context of the rest of the film it just doesn't work. It doesn't explain the guy in blackface dancing at the beginning, with the 'mexican guy', or the guy in blackface peeking around the door frame at the bar, the guy in (brown face?) at the party, the 'chinaman' at the tattoo parlor, or the blackface twins at the end. There's nothing ironic about those, there's no commentary on the stereotype, they all appear to just be stuck in there to try to get a cheap laugh.
i think its a part of history, and its funny to point out the mistakes in history
That's fine, except that none of the stuff I listed does any 'pointing out' of the mistakes in history, in fact it basically seems to just repeat them.
The truly ironic part is that not one of those things really added anything much to the story, and that if you'd simply left them out and spent the time on making the rest of it a bit more polished it could have been a much better film.
yeah well sorry bout it, the 48hour film festival is not about making a master piece, its about having fun.
That's a bit of a cop out. Sure, it's not about making a masterpiece - but I've seen quite a few 48 hour films, and for the most part everyone tries to make the best film possible within the constraints of the project. Was this really the best you could do?
Second, try and plan for the minimum length (4 minutes, I believe) and go for the best pacing that you can. There are a number of segments in your short and you really should have just picked one thing (like the martial arts ball breaker) and expand on that one thing or character. You tried doing too much with this one.