archived-videos Would you please critique my first rough cut...

[gorillaonabike]

This is my first rough cut of my first ever no budget short so would greatly appreciate your advice and if you would please let me know your thoughts. Not that I'm nervous or anything... * gulp *

Password fzr400 - https://vimeo.com/47688049 - starts 29 seconds in. I will be taking it down in a week as I will be applying the ideas that come through this forum.

It's sort of... 'experimental' and unusual and not a 'normal' narrative. If any of you have thoughts, I'd really appreciate it. Naturally, it needs to have the sound cleaned up, colouring, a few cuts and music.

It's my first ever short and I learned around a million things, most of which I will put into my next short. Experience is a cruel, harsh mistress... However, if I could have the benefit of your opinions, I would really appreciate it.

Many thanks in advance.

 

[Zensteve]

I really liked this. Found it to be very touching.

The final 20 seconds or so went a bit overboard, I reckon, when all the "I love you" comments dircetd at the camera bust out.

Aside from that, I think it's awesome. (I'm assuming you're going to fix up all that audio, etc, that is)

 

[Jack Lynt]

Tonight, the night after watching your film, I happened to watch a nice little documentary about Finnish men and their spas.

Steam of Life.

Yup, who woulda thought?

Unfortunately, looks like it's not available for streaming. Anyway, I felt like it shared a lot of qualities with your film. It too takes a confessional approach, and it too has what I would consider to be a quarky closing. At the end, the filmmakers have the film's participants singing a song to the camera. That song singing, as far as I caught, is not, or it hardly is set-up.

But it works.

I don't really have a point, I guess, other than this. I still think that I feel that the I love yous are a little disjointed in that I feel maybe they're not set-up as much as I might prefer. But on the other hand, having just watched Steam of Life with its closing that felt strikingly like your closing, in a way, I'd say that it's given me new eyes with which to view your closing...maybe I'm warming up to it. Not that that's either here or there or your concern. That would be wrong. =P

Good luck in post and your next film already in progress.

=)

 

[gorillaonabike]

I really liked this. Found it to be very touching.

The final 20 seconds or so went a bit overboard, I reckon, when all the "I love you" comments dircetd at the camera bust out.

Aside from that, I think it's awesome. (I'm assuming you're going to fix up all that audio, etc, that is)

Wow, thanks! I was shooting for 'touching' and meaningful (real love vs being seduced by the false empty love of the manager and fickle fame). Don't know how many other people will be touched by it but hey, let's see!

Otherwise, yes, there is an ending problem and I am going absolutely overboard. It is highly unusual and an artistic choice that may be totally wrong.

Also, it is clear I need to get the shears out. What do you think about the length? I am getting to understand I need to hack it down.

 

[gorillaonabike]

Tonight, the night after watching your film, I happened to watch a nice little documentary about Finnish men and their spas.

Steam of Life.

Yup, who woulda thought?

Unfortunately, looks like it's not available for streaming. Anyway, I felt like it shared a lot of qualities with your film. It too takes a confessional approach, and it too has what I would consider to be a quarky closing. At the end, the filmmakers have the film's participants singing a song to the camera. That song singing, as far as I caught, is not, or it hardly is set-up.

But it works.

I don't really have a point, I guess, other than this. I still think that I feel that the I love yous are a little disjointed in that I feel maybe they're not set-up as much as I might prefer. But on the other hand, having just watched Steam of Life with its closing that felt strikingly like your closing, in a way, I'd say that it's given me new eyes with which to view your closing...maybe I'm warming up to it. Not that that's either here or there or your concern. That would be wrong. =P

Good luck in post and your next film already in progress.

=)

That's interesting. SPOILERS for anyone who is brave enough to sit through my little movie.

It's a tussle from an artistic perspective and I'm actually a little disappointed that someone else has a similar approach. However, where it differs is mine is an artistic narrative shot with documentary elements - everything is polarised - the talking head vs the action, the false love vs real love, fame vs obscurity and obscurity is better because of the real love. Part of the reason for the slight 'judder' at the end is I want it to be polarised vs the previous part... and also I didn't have enough footage to set it up properly... but hey, I'm learning from my mistakes...

But right now I have a larger issue which is explaining to my lady why I was watching a trailer with lots of naked Finnish men in Saunas... Must shoot... erm, not literally...vv

 

[AudioPostExpert]

Thanks and I would've loved you to do the sound design on this too! Unfortunately, I am cashless...

I have toyed with the idea of offering my services for free on this one but at 9 mins, it would take a week or two to do a really good job and that's a bit too much time to be paying operating costs/expenses. Also, you'd need a bit of a budget to buy a few quality sound FX.

I think the short won't be powerful enough because I don't have enough understanding of sound to really power through the changes. I have some ideas - 'heartbeats' in a couple of places, stereo effects, crowd noises, silence etc... but these are just random tinkering.

I think you're on the right lines here. The heartbeats idea is perhaps a little cliche but something rhythmic in one or two places which is reminiscent of a heartbeat but more abstract could work nicely. You could also use crowd noise creatively, both to emphasise what the interviewees are talking about and as an element of continuity, tying the points of similarity in the interviewees' stories together. Again though I wouldn't be too obvious about this (by using the same crowd noise for every interviewee), instead I would be looking for crowd noises relevant to each interviewee's field of endeavour. You could then play with these different crowd noises, using effects to morph them into something more abstract/surreal at times and depending on how individual they are, you might possibly even use the wrong ones occasionally to link back to another interviewee. Where you use these crowd sounds, how convincing they are and how you bring them in and out will define whether it succeeds in manipulating the audience's emotions or just sounds cheesy.

Also, remember that true silence never exists in film but the illusion of silence can arguably be the most powerful and shocking of sound design tools. But, using silence (or the illusion of it) is very much a two edged sword. Like with some visual edits, a few frames too much (or too little) or using it inappropriately can rapidly turn a scene or an entire film from being dramatic and emotive to being confusing, boring, cheap or all three!

And as a note, we have already shot a trailer for another short with a little fighting in as an experiment for the next 'full' short. It's tricky - really tricky to make it real but I'm working on it.

Much of sound design is not about trying to recreate reality, rather the illusion of reality. This sounds like like semantic double speak but artistically, it's what separates the good sound designers from the poor ones. The real sound of a fight would be a huge anti-climax in a film. What we are really doing is playing with psychoacoustics, using the fact that there is a big difference between actual sound and the perception of sound as a tool to manipulate the audience's emotions. For example, using sound design tricks like hyper-reality to increase the emotional impact of a scene while still maintaining the illusion of reality. This is a very fine line to walk, requiring skill and good monitoring equipment to pull off convincingly as just the tiniest bit too much destroys the illusion of reality and pulls the audience out of the entire scene, which is particularly bad news in fight scenes as they tend to be the climax points in most narrative films. I've got no real sage advice in how to accomplish this, it takes experience and good equipment, but I would advise that it's better to under do it than to over do it because under doing it means less dramatic impact but over doing it means pulling the audience out of the scene and therefore little or no dramatic impact at all.

G

 

[JoshL]

Okay, gave it a look! Very touching, and a great concept. The dancing shots were really great, and I like the intimate "speaking to the camera" approach. I too would have liked some shots of the singer at a theater; the paparazzi scene didn't seem to work all that week, for me anyway. Did seem a bit on the long side, but I'm not sure it'll feel that way once you get some music in place. A bit more set-up for the ending would have been good, but I got where you were going with it as it is.

As a musician, I did find it odd that the singer talked about the fans and approval, but not about the actual music itself.

Overall, I enjoyed the film very much! Good first effort!

 

[gorillaonabike]

Okay, gave it a look! Very touching, and a great concept. The dancing shots were really great, and I like the intimate "speaking to the camera" approach. I too would have liked some shots of the singer at a theater; the paparazzi scene didn't seem to work all that week, for me anyway. Did seem a bit on the long side, but I'm not sure it'll feel that way once you get some music in place. A bit more set-up for the ending would have been good, but I got where you were going with it as it is.

As a musician, I did find it odd that the singer talked about the fans and approval, but not about the actual music itself.

Overall, I enjoyed the film very much! Good first effort!

Wow, thanks! I'll have to do something else with the paparazzi but am desperately short of footage for the theatre. Couldn't find a theatre in London which would let me shoot.

I'll work on it, though. I'll see if I can find something but realistically, it will have to go 'as is' because I just do not have the available footage.

 

[gorillaonabike]

What shutter speed did you shoot the bikes at?

Lots of different settings due to rain / sun / bike speeds etc... It was painful getting any footage, especially as some of the closer shots were down to me sneaking onto the side of the circuit which resulted in the marshalls having a word with me...

But overall, thank you to everyone for the tremendously constructive criticism. I feel better about putting together such a crazy-looking, technically difficult short with such a weird style and strange themes. It is such a left-field arthouse short, I am delighted you all almost universally have expressed that it is competent although I will take the comments such as 'awesome' and 'accomplished' with tremendous grattitude as well as the comments around 'too long' and 'your sound sucks big time.'

So thank you to everyone who contributed. I really appreciate this and will now get out the shears and ideas around sound.

More than that, I appreciate all the help I have been getting form everyone on this forum. Lots of advice has contributed to getting this far and I can't wait to complete this and start to shoot the next no budget short!