Masters of Horror Ep. Shot on HVX Airing This Friday!

John_Hudson said:
Kholi

$2,000,000 ?

I guarantee victory.
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That's what I don't understand. The subject matter was there-for-you like Sin City was there for Rodriguez... you just needed to apply yourself to it. I could totally see what the writing was about, and the actual moving image just DID NOT detail this.

There is one part I got well, and that was the sexual tension between the lead and his wife. It probably got as down-to-earth and sold the undertone for the story, and then you go and camp the remainder of it up.

Prime example: SPOILER ALERT : the scene where the older lady gets hers. It was so campy, to me anyway.

With a 2mil budget, this should've been a stellar example of Digital Movie/Film Production; it was not on many levels outside of technical. I still saved it though, because those exteriors were NICE.
 
Yeah, I suppose with the budget, the episode should have been better. I also agree with you guys that there are much better examples of the footage you can shoot with the hvx on this website (Illegal is an excellent example). I don't have as much experience as some of you with regards to cinematography, however, I think the average movie-goer wouldn't be able to tell that the episode wasn't shot on film.

I think this episode could definitely been darker (execution-wise) than it was. It was a little bland. Not too horrifying. Oh well.

I'll tell you what though. I'd love to see what Robert Rodriguez could do with 2 milllion dollars and an HVX...
 
"So would I and just about everyone else here..."

Yeah and I'm sure that everyone here could make a movie as good as Gremlins our Innerspace. Yeah right.

Robert Rodriguez hasn't shot a movie for 2 million or under since El Mariachi.

You can tell a lack of knowledge about how things are done in Hollywierd.

With big name directors like John Carpenter and Joe Dante and John Landis they aren't working for free. Niether are actor like Elliot Gould and Jason Priestly. It's also not cheap paying the dozens of actors and dozens of crew union wages. This all comes out of the two million dollar budget.

Saw's cost is not a good comparison. Most of the action took place on one set with two actors. The Screwfly Solution had way more actors and 15+ locations that had to be shot in 10 days. No comparison.
 
Yeah end of the day though regardless of all it's content and actors, STILL a shitty ep. saw = 1.2 mil (creative filmmaking) screwfly = 2 mil (shitty waste if money)

my 2 cents...

*Does anyone know how much they would have saved buy using a HVX? That'd be cool to know!
 
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Anyone see it in high def? I have it on my DVR.

I agree that it could've looked better, but honestly, it looked better than I expected. Exteriors certainly looked the best, but overall it looked ok in HD.
 
Elton said:
Anyone see it in high def? I have it on my DVR.

I agree that it could've looked better, but honestly, it looked better than I expected. Exteriors certainly looked the best, but overall it looked ok in HD.
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I saw it in HD too. I still have it on my HD DVR.
 
joshtownsend said:
"So would I and just about everyone else here..."

Yeah and I'm sure that everyone here could make a movie as good as Gremlins our Innerspace. Yeah right.

Robert Rodriguez hasn't shot a movie for 2 million or under since El Mariachi.

You can tell a lack of knowledge about how things are done in Hollywierd.

With big name directors like John Carpenter and Joe Dante and John Landis they aren't working for free. Niether are actor like Elliot Gould and Jason Priestly. It's also not cheap paying the dozens of actors and dozens of crew union wages. This all comes out of the two million dollar budget.

Saw's cost is not a good comparison. Most of the action took place on one set with two actors. The Screwfly Solution had way more actors and 15+ locations that had to be shot in 10 days. No comparison.
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The solutions to many of the badly shot scenes in "The Screwfly Solution" were not complicated. Given the presumed time and money spent on the shoots I think the criticism of the lighting is valid. How long does it take to stick a reflector or softbox on an actor so his face doesn't look like a mudpie?

As far as "a lack of knowledge about how things are done in Hollywierd", speaking for myself, I'm not a DP or director (yet), but I've done dozens of feature films as a scoring mixer, some of which you might well have seen (The Notorious Bettie Page, American Splendor, Barcelona, Last Days Of Disco). Several of them were nominated for Oscars. I'm also a trained actor, appearing in numerous features and short films. And I own a very nice HVX setup, complete with lighting, mics, FCP etc. And a recording studio business. And I've read or watched every bloody thing I can get my hands on about every aspect of filmmaking.

So I didn't exactly just fall off the turnip truck...

"Only" a $2 million budget isn't enough of an excuse to scewfly up the camera work, irrespective of the number of locations. If the other aspects of the episode were just great it might suggest "forgiving" the camearwork, but they weren't. The show was quite badly done in many ways. Most ways.

I thnk "Gremlins" was great movie, but it was made in the mid-80's and was one of the last features Dante did before he started doing almost nothing but TV shows (see IMDB).

Sure Robert Rodriguez hasn't made any low budget films lately. He doesn't have to. Apparently, for the most part, Dante does. My response regarding Rodriguez was based on the hunch that if he had to make a low budget film (again) he'd find a way to make it great. I doubt he'd end up with a TV episode that looked as amateurish (at least at times) as "The Screwfly Solution". Just my opinion...
 
All I'm saying is that you can't compare an indie feature to a showtime hourlong TV show. If anything compare Screwfly Solution to other Master of Horror episodes. Dante's episode has way more set ups and locations and has a broader canvas than any of the other episodes. I think they were able to accomplish this with the HD camera. I wasn't all that immpressed with the episode either.

Sure member here could make the HVX shine more than they did in that episode. A lot of people have had a year to play with the camera while the Masters of Horror DP has spent the last year shooting Masters of Horror episodes on 35mm film. But there are very few people who here who would know how to shoot those an episode in ten day for two million and still get something that is classic. They've shot 20+ episodes all with very experienced directors and only a few episodes really shine. To say that anyone here could do a better job directing an episode is a big stretch.

Just my opinion.
 
joshtownsend said:
To say that anyone here could do a better job directing an episode is a big stretch.
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Arguably, yes. But speaking of Robert Rodriguez again - have you seen "El Mariachi"? I did just recently, for the first time, after getting wind of the whole $7K backstory here on DVXUser. For my money there's better directing in there by a 23 year old (at the time) unknown with amateur (REALLY amateur) actors than there is in "The Screwfly Solution" with its name brand director and expensive actors. I think in many ways the episode was a perfect example of plain old bad TV. There's good TV too, much of it on Showtime.

It wouldn't surprise me to see a feature shot on an HVX200 for WAY less than $2 mil by someone on this board in the not too distant future that puts "The Screwfly Solution" to shame in nearly every way. I'll be standing in line at the theatre when it comes out...
 
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Well, I just watched it. Yeah, disappointing. But I don't think I'd call it "campy". It seems like they played it straight, with a few exceptions. The script was actually pretty decent, I thought. But so many of the technical aspects were so flawed.

The performances, with few exceptions (I thought the wife was fine), were pretty awful.
The editing was poor.
The shot choice was fine, and I thought it looked fine overall, but any time the camera moved it was jerky and noticeably bad.
But far, far and away the worst thing was THE MUSIC. Oh my god, the music. So many moments that could have been actual drama became laughable in the face of that film-school music.

Sigh. I think if you fixed just those two worst aspects (the music and performances) you could have a really solid film on your hands. Like josh, I have no problem seeing where all the money went, and I won't fault the production value much. But the show's just not very good, because of what seems like just awful laziness to me.
 
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