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watch Details - Science Fiction Short

O

Optically Minded

Synopsis:

Miranda finds herself the captive of an organization that insists that she had volunteered to be the subject of a dangerous experiment. But Miranda can't remember volunteering or anything else at all about her life on the outside.
Click to expand...

You can watch it here: http://www.vimeo.com/23768000

Images:

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I'm posting this to get critiques and suggestions on where to improve and what to do differently on the next video. Let me know what you think! :D
 
Overall, I thought it was very good. It came across as a piece of a larger story, not a story in itself. The character was fairly undeveloped so I was not sure what was desired of her. I might have thrown in short visual clips of her past that is just on the edge of her memory--picture of as a child swinging, her laughing with a young man. Flashes that are ambiguous but resonate with the audience.

The narration seemed spongy (lacking substance) and dragged the clip out longer than needed. The camera shots, 3D effects, and sound were well done.

The ending was unsatisfying to me as a viewer largely because nothing was resolved. We started in the middle of a story and left before the end. There is a lapse in continuity of concept in the storyline which causes a knee-jerk. She has heightened sense but provides nothing to help rescue her.

To finish this is a story, I would have added a short addition, "They are coming for me now. And they are changing me. I am learning about myself. And soon I will come for them." This gives the psychological satisfaction the audience craves. Yes, they haul her away. But she starts off weak and ends more powerful.

But I think the clip is very well shot and conceived.
 
Thanks for the critiques FantasySciFi! :)

I wanted to avoid a "cliche" happy ending but looking back at it I do see your point. There is little in terms of resolution but perhaps it's enough to leave the audience "hanging" and wanting more.
 
For your next piece:

With the dialog beginning almost immediately there's little opportunity to get caught up to speed on what's going on. Even a few more seconds of scene intro before dialog begins would be useful to the audience.

The trombones blare at parity with the canny/cheap speakers VO dialog, which I like very much as a nice effect, masking much of the appreciation for the story.
Two approaches:
- 1. Knock down the whole soundtrack-to-dialog to a minimum of a 40/60 split, my preference is 30/70.
- 2. Manually face the soundtrack in and out/up and down to accommodate sparse patched of dialog. Obviously that's more time and labor and runs the risk of creating a warbling soundtrack wave effect, but maybe if used conservatively...

Don't know what criteria/audience limitations were placed, but choking a person unconscious or dead goes much more graphically than shown @ 3:29. Even a suggested choking out of frame goes worse. For time considerations... I dunno. For suggesting a real choking... I dunno. I'm just grunting and pointing. Sorry.

Regarding hanging the audience for more, could have shown the black hat & coat suit man as an executive employee at the facility now faced with a dilemma: Compassion for subject or Conviction of greater good. Classic means to an end, desperate times call for desperate measures sorta stuff.

Make the story follow the test subject - and - the voice recorder, the latter being a tool to drag more characters into the story as it's weaved complexity becomes more evident.
Perhaps the injured, (now dead?) paper-suit transporter has a personal or professional relationship to the black suit.
Maybe there's a whole other story going on.
Maybe black suit lets her go. Then finds out she killed his paper suit brother.
Maybe the paper suit was injured saving black suit the night before and now black suit is after her.
Maybe paper suit thought he killed black suit last night in a workplace coup attempt and now he's set her free.
Cut down on the dragging elsewhere to step up the complexity with the same characters in the same time footprint.

The languishing pace nears sophomoric drama hyperbole.
Don't be afraid to demand a bit more from your audience.
Dump in some more Paul Greengrass!
 
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That was pretty groovy. Very nice cinematography and lighting.

The only thing I didn't care for was the performance of the VO.
 
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It looked good. But other than that, there is very little there. It's all exposition. I think one

way to get around that would have been to start with the guy that she passed the recorder

off to. He finds it, begins to listen. Then, you go into the VO, and at the end we see him cut

off the recorder and burn it. Because he's one of "them". ??? Just a suggestion. Then you

have a story.
 
All of your plot devices are really hard to believe. I don't understand how a random civilian would be able to get that close to a secret laboratory and not get shot. And why was the guard with the broken leg chosen to escort the girl? Shouldn't he have been sent home on disability?

I'm not a big fan of the title either.
 
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