GATHERING SOULS.......A Richard Johnson Film

[Richard J. Johnson]

Yikes, this really surprised me; I'm so disappointed not to see this in the finals. I agree with Sprocket, you better get this out into the festival circuit asap.

Thanks Curugon. For you to say that means a GREAT DEAL. Your film got 10 stars from me and I totally think you will win it.

i really can't believe this one didn't make it. not the other finalists weren't good, but I thought this was a lock for sure.

but, we don't make movies to win contests, and I think you should be proud of what you did here. good luck with your future films.

I appreciate that soffcore. I am happy you enjoyed it.

Sorry, Rich. Don't let it get you down.

MAH

No doubt. I'm good. We were up against some stiff comp. and I'm happy for those that made it!

um, rich, you know that there's a gazillion other film festivals out there that you can go and win!

I hope so. We are looking now to see what we can enter. It was a lot fun making it.

I just want to clarify to everyone that we take these fests very serious. Every one of the ratings that comes in is carefully checked to ensure no one is trying to cheat the system. If we see trends that are clear "ballot stuffing" situations we talk to the person and give them a chance to explain and/or correct, and if that doesn't happen we invalidate those ratings.

In addition, we have carefully designed this system to be extremely fair and reasonable in gathering the will of the people. We have tuned it over several fests and it has now run solidly for quite some time and proven itself over and over. The system is designed such that even when people try to stuff the ballot (rating a 10 for their film and all 1s for the others) it does NOT significantly alter the outcome.

The system is built on the concept of an average and so each entry is ranked on the overall average rating based on the total number of ratings a particular entry receives. Not only does this make the ranking more accurate and more fair, it also levels out the entries based on the fact that not every entry gets as many ratings as another.

I can promise you, that this system is very important to us and we, the mods, examine it every fest to ensure we are being as fair and accurate as possible.

So rest assured, there is no conspiracy and I would appreciate if you have any issues or questions that you bring them to us, rather than impugning us in the open forum.

Thanks Larry. I'm cool with it though. Zero issues from me. The mods are great here. and I love competing, but of course no one likes to lose.

[Larry Rutledge]

Thanks Larry. I'm cool with it though. Zero issues from me. The mods are great here. and I love competing, but of course no one likes to lose.

No issue with you, my issue was with the comment I quoted which implied some sort of impropriety.

Enjoyed your film and look forward to your next one.

[Anthony Todaro]

Larry, a conspiracy is an unknown phenomena. I wouldn't expect anyone to know about it, or be able to prevent it. A conspiracy implies zero impropriety on DVXusers part because DVXuser would be the conspiracies victim, not the initiator. I appreciate all the hard work around here too but what I said does not imply DVXuser has done anything wrong or will in the future.

For the record I don't know Richard. I was just literally stunned that this caliber of filmmaking didn't get to the finals. It just seems weird because the standard of quality and execution in this seem high above the average finalist. I guess that's just my opinion.

Apologies to Richard for the flame up.

[Richard J. Johnson]

No issue with you, my issue was with the comment I quoted which implied some sort of impropriety.

Enjoyed your film and look forward to your next one.

Very cool Larry, I greatly appreciate that!

For the record I don't know Richard. I was just literally stunned that this caliber of filmmaking didn't get to the finals. It just seems weird because the standard of quality and execution in this seem high above the average finalist. I guess that's just my opinion.

Apologies to Richard for the flame up.

Man, that means a ton! Thank you.

No worries though. We always try to keep the flamage to a minimum around here.

[Ramana]

above all else, this was a film about shallow focus! ;)

Vampire Sheriff, great concept, great potential, make another with dat character!

[Richard J. Johnson]

above all else, this was a film about shallow focus! ;)

Vampire Sheriff, great concept, great potential, make another with dat character!

But shallow focus makes everything better.

Thanks Ramana!

[Rodney V. Smith]

Rich I watched this one first on the first night and I've been trying to think of the right way to review this film. It's taken a few viewings just to nail down some of my thoughts, so bear with me.

Your sens eof cinematography as always is awesome. You have some nice shots in there, but the diting where you held on some of those out of fosus shots a little too long kinda killed it for me. A tighter edit would have been nice to see. Your actors did some good work, although at times there was a little bit too much overracting, like they knew they were caricatures of "Mickey and Mallory Knox" from Natural Born Killers, but all in all I was able to follow with them and they didn;t throw me out of the story.

No wI don;t know how this came about, scriptwise or an editing choice (I remember readign this script a while ago) but it feels like two different movies and that may have hurt it in the long run. The first story is the torture porn Mickey and Mal,ory setup, and then the second one is the Lawman coming after them. The struture just didn;t mesh well enough to make it work and have the impact that it should have and I think it's becasue it took so long to meet our Lawman. If he had come in a lot earlier instead of focusing on the horror of the motel, it would have focused us in the right way. As it is by the time he shows up we're invested in our killers and their actions. Yes it's a misdirection but it's a HUGE one and for a short film it may have worked against it. I haven;t read the other reviews so I don;t know if anyone else has mentioned this, but it's one of the main reasons it took me so long to review this film. Thing is, it's fixable, either with pickup shots or scrambling the edit so that it works and flows better.

It was a good effort and shot well, but in the end it just didn't work that well for me. And I always dig your work as well as Keaton's scripts.

[Richard J. Johnson]

^Thanks Rodney! I appreciate the compliments and critiques.

[Ralph D]

I really liked this one. Very well done.