My first short film is done!

[NolanM1Studios]

I haven’t publicly released it yet, but this is my first ever horror short film solely edited and directed by me, a 16 year old.
Some early feedback and thoughts would be immensely helpful for me! Thanks

 

[Aspiring Mogul]

Good work! Unlike some of us, who just talk about filming, you actually did it. I'm not an expert, but perhaps the others in this forum can give you feedback, and perhaps you may be inspired to try again.

 

[Chris Tempel]

Major kudos to you! I'll admit that I only skimmed it, but you had some unique camera angles from what I could see. The reason I skimmed was the length. It's hard for me to sit down and commit to 20 minutes from someone that I know nothing about. A piece of advice I was given early on after I too did a 20 minute "short" was that shorts should be SHORT. 1-5 minutes tops. If I have some time, I will sit down and watch this all the way through, but for now, it's just too long for me. That said, I know the amount of work that goes into creating a movie and the fact that your first one is 20 minutes is super impressive!

My challenge to you would be to do a three minute short. I think if you can put the same amount of thought and care into a three minute movie, you'll blow us all away!

 

[sfoster]

Hi Nolan,

I personally like fast paced stories with music and dialogue, and typically shy away from horror in general.
This was so slow that I turned the speed to 2x and it still felt slow to me, but again, I don't watch horror films.

I'm definitely not your target audience! The only silent films I've enjoyed are comedy.

For some constructivce criticism.. I did not like the ambient noise that you picked. It's kinda harsh and grating.
It works for short scenes but to have 20 straight minutes of that noise was very unpleasant.

Most people watch TV on in the background and play with their phones.
Try browsing on your phone with this movie playing in the background, having to listen to that unpleasant static, I think you'll find you want to change the channel to something that sounds better.

 

[AcousticAl]

Hi, Nolan. Congrats on completing your short film!

I’m not sure where, exactly, you ended up, but I’m confident you could have gotten there in 1/3 the time. The pacing is painfully slow, and the long stretches don’t really help build tension; they simply stagnate.

Also, why did you choose to add the lo-fi/VHS noise over the entire piece? I’m genuinely curious what your motivation was there.

From a sound editing editing perspective, this lacked a cohesive sound design. For something with no dialog, and that seems to have been shot on a camera with no production sound support, I’d have ditched any camera mic audio entirely and rebuilt everything in post. Even with a much tighter edit, there is much to focus on that can benefit from a well-thought-out sound edit, and those sounds can also help enhance the tension.

Sound effects are neat and all, but they have to sit properly in the mix and to sound like they exist in the visual world. There was an inconsistency in which sounds felt natural to the world you built, and which ones felt like they were dropped in from an SFX library with little adjustment after. SFX shouldn’t be too startlingly loud, and should have some acoustic response to the visual space (natural-sounding reverb).

Use of camera-mic sound can also harm the film simply in the shot-to-shot edit. When cutting between takes in the same scene/sequence, the noise floor should remain constant. Along those lines, too, are some of your ambient sound beds. The rain, for example, didn’t fit. While the rain, visually, is taking place in open spaces outdoors, the rain recording itself sounded like it was recorded in a hollow porch space. There was also a consistent sound of drops hitting, perhaps, the microphone or the plastic chassis of the recorder, which was very distracting. Backgrounds need to be intentional, and are rarely built with just one stereo recording. I’ll often layer at least 3 or 4 background elements together to create a convincing aural world that works with the visuals and the overall tone of the film.