Looking for Feedback

[HVXOU]

Hey everyone,

I was hoping I could get some feedback on the most recent short I shot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKk4hrpIMSg


Annually, Ohio University’s School of Media Arts and Studies, puts on the Shootout video competition. For the third year we have participated, and this has been by far our best year. Shootout is a competition to make a 3-5 minute film in 48 hours. In that time frame each team has to write, shoot, and edit their film in its entirety.


Each team is given a prop, genre, and a line of dialogue that must be an intricate part of the story.

Our elements are as followed:
Prop: Socks
Genre: Slapstick
Line of Dialogue: “How did she do it?”


After a bit of feedback, I'll give a bit of insight into how some of the things were shot and then ask if they were done correctly.


Thanks!

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

Hey everyone,

I was hoping I could get some feedback on the most recent short I shot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKk4hrpIMSg


Annually, Ohio University’s School of Media Arts and Studies, puts on the Shootout video competition. For the third year we have participated, and this has been by far our best year. Shootout is a competition to make a 3-5 minute film in 48 hours. In that time frame each team has to write, shoot, and edit their film in its entirety.


Each team is given a prop, genre, and a line of dialogue that must be an intricate part of the story.

Our elements are as followed:
Prop: Socks
Genre: Slapstick
Line of Dialogue: “How did she do it?”


After a bit of feedback, I'll give a bit of insight into how some of the things were shot and then ask if they were done correctly.


Thanks!

Anything that has "A <whatever>works Orange", and doesn't have nudity, violence, and the old in-out-in-out, just doesn't make it...

But aside from that, some of the gags did drag. I think the film could be tightened up quite a bit, and still have a understandable story...

[Noiz2]

OK as a 48hr film you get some slack but I'm going to comment like you had time. Script a bit weak. Some of that is understandable in the lime constraints but this looks like a lot of short comedies in that you spend WAY TOO much time showing stuff your audience already knows. admitedly the sock that takes control is a stretch by any measure but after we know it's going to do that we don't need to be told again and again that that is what's happening. In a comedy, especially, you need to be ahead of your audience. The minute we know what's going to come next we look for the remote. There are exceptions but only for rare events. Fibber McGee's closet comes to mind but they only did that gag a hand full of times over a multi decade run. Second sound get trashed in these kinds of films and it's really too bad because a decent sound track (not music) could have gone a long way to help some of the scenes. Like using the same hit over and over again is kinda funny, but having full blown Hong Kong action hits would have worked better. All that stuff she is doing to get the sock off would have sold better IF it had sounded interesting and probably over the top. You have the ladder go over but no body fall??? She kicks the bike (silently) and then we have a thin bike fall sound? With this film I would have pushed fot the sock to have it's own signature sound. Acting... As a regular short I would say thumbs down. But since this was mostly an on the fly kind of thing~~~OK. My problem is that she has this Lucile Ball esque delivery BUT that is really hard to pull off. It would have been a better choice to play a more realistic surprise and frustration with the sock. But that would have been a luck choice since she had just about zero time to come up with a character. The pie guys... I ended up feeling a bit cheated. You set up a table of cream pies obviously for a pie fight and then no pie fight? It's like the old Chekov rule. If you show a gun prominently in act one you had better use it by the end of act three.

Editing... Like the story comment I would tighten it up a lot. If you need ed more length I would have done more/ better coverage of the sock in action. Cut to a CU of it tripping maybe? But that might be wrong also? It's hard with comedy, timing is very important and I'm no expert so all I can say is the timing felt slow and it isn't "right". In the end the "fix" might be to make some shots longer? It needs to feel tighter and that doesn't nec. mean shorter shots.

If you had spent a lot of time on this I would give you 1 1/2 stars, some points for a cute idea minus a bunch on execution. For a 48 hour film I'm guessing your in the top 10%. I've worked on some and they are fun to do but you don't often end up with something that would hold up in a "real" film festival. It's kind of the nature of the beast. It could always be better and most I have seen aren't going to get a lot better with more post because the folks making it didn't have a very good idea of what film they were making so the parts to make a "good film" are often missing in action.

Just so you don't think I'm looking down on you. I worked on a 24 hr one that had all folks who had made features and were at least sort of working in the biz. And I would have given us about the same score. We stayed away from "comedy" and stuck with more of an "off beat humorous" angle so it probably held up better? But it had almost all of my above comments. I do sound for a living and other than feeding some sound to the edit I didn't have any time to polish the sound at all. The script had big holes and the acting was OK (these were all working actors) the edit was probably pretty decent because the director is an editor and was used to shooting to the edit in his head. But I know we were lacking coverage and were way behind where we wanted to be and didn't really know what story we should have been shooting till 1/2 way through the shoot. So don't get discouraged. These kinds of shoots are not really about the end product they are about the process of getting there.