Hey Kids

S

StrandedVoyager

Hey boys and girls,

How you all doing? I'm new to indietalk and decided to finally join a film making community. I've decided to join this community because I've decided I'm going to establish a career in the film arts. I would really like to read other people's ideas who are already established and exchange information. I've wanted to make films for as long as I could remember and I've been making films since I was sixteen (note: I didn't say they were good). I just put in two years in a film school but found it completely unrewarding and uninteresting, I had one awesome mentor but for the most part it was rather blah. I recently formed a production group and right now we're working on a television show. We decided to do a television show instead of a film because I figure that a short film or a full-length would be fifteen minutes to ninety minutes with maybe one idea to a dozen ideas while a independent television show will be about six hours and with the format we've chosen it'll be hundreds of different ideas. Also I look at this television show as a boot camp for myself and my fellow comrades to learn and see what works and what doesn't. I've worked on quite a few short films and I found a great expense of energy for not much reward. Anyway we're hoping to get our TV show on a couple of public access channels in big cities and we already have a website and myspace. I guess what I hope to gain from this community is a sense of how to do business the right way within this industry since I've had my nose so far down to the grind stone in terms of studying styles I liked and trying to create cool things that I never really thought of the business side. One of the coolest things with doing this TV show is that I've learned there's so much more to film making than just writing, shooting, and editing. I've had to think about advertising, web design, budgets, etc. Anyway... I'm rambling and I apologize for that but I just wanted to say hey.
 
The colors of the website are pretty hard on the eyes.

As for the video... I watched about half of the first episode. The lighting in the psychic Sam commercial left much to be desired.. he was very hard to see, and the audio was pretty rough. Too much echo, and the sound of the rocks in his hand was too overpowering and unclear as to what it was until he said something about it. Also the scrolling text was pretty wordy and hard to focus on while trying to listen to his ramblings.

The first video segment had a lot of build up for a punchline that really wasn't terribly funny. Also there was severe interlaced artifacting throughout most of it, especially on the fast moves and the time remapped segments. You should be sure to deinterlace your footage prior to time remapping, and definitely before exporting for the web.

Please don't take this the wrong way.. I intend my criticism to be constructive, not destructive. I'd like to see you focus on better audio and lighting. Giving the whole thing a more polished look and perhaps a bit more depth to the sketches would help this project significantly. It would be good if you were able to really stand out from the standard cable access fodder, and I think it would help you build a following. Right now the sketches (those I watched) felt unfinished -- like you thought of a situation, but not really the story for each part. That may not be the case, but I think the writing could benefit from a little more depth.

I also noticed that there is a bit too much dead air between segments, cutting the individual pieces together a bit tighter would make it feel more cohesive.

Anyway, the important thing is that you've got a group of people assembled, and you're actively producing something. Focus on some more of the technical aspects (lighting, audio, editing), and solidify the stories a little more and you should be good. The hardest part is usually just getting going, now that you've accomplished that, iron out the kinks.

There are a lot of sketch type shows on TV, Cable, and the internet.. what you need to do is figure out what about YOUR show is different, find an angle that sets yours apart from the others and it will give people a reason to watch.

Anyway... hope some of that helps a bit. Congrats on getting out there and making something happen -- tweak, tighten, and polish and you'll be golden. :)

Good luck!
 
Thank you very much for your opinions Will, they were taken to heart and the ones we agree with will be addressed for sure in the second episode in the coming weeks. To be honest the first episode of our show wasn't really released, it just kind of escaped. We had a time deadline and a horrific hardware snafu that basically left about two days for post production which is why the show was so thrown together. If I had to rate the first episode myself I'd probably give it a 3.5 out of 10 just because I think there were some ideas I was proud of in it but the thrown together amateurish feeling of the show is not something I like in my work. We just had a hard deadline and wanted to see what the format of the show would be like. I knew we were going to get blasted in most of the reviews or in viewer comments but honestly I had rather have bad reactions than no reactions. Surprisingly a few people have seemed to like what we're doing and we've been getting some support. I hope we can get people back to check out the second episode though because that's the first episode we actually had the time to make it right. Although we'll probably get blasted there too lol.

Anyways man, thanks for the comments, love, advice, and criticism :)
 
Hey guys,

I hope it's cool but I think I'll just keep posting in this thread for my questions and such so I don't clutter your forum up with my thoughts and questions. My question I pose to you good people, could anyone recommend and computer program or some way to stabilize the audio for my show? We just released the second episode and we're pretty proud of it because I think we're getting better and making progress but the post production for audio is still giving me fits.

Thank you =)
 
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