Short film "Among Us"

F

FatBird19

Well-known member
I am the executive producer for a short film that our crew shot for a university class project. I didn't like the final cut of the movie, so I edited my own version.

It was a lot of fun to make. Shot in 1080p over a period of 2 weeks, we had the project split up over 2 different crews(with 2 different directors); one crew for the interior stuff and one for the exteriors.

I just showed the movie to the writer and director of the interior shooting and he doesn't like my cut. I wanted to get some of your guys' unbiased opinions. Here's my Producer's cut of "Among Us". Any comments you could give would be great:
Among Us_LARGE

I'll be working on posting the original cut once I get it compressed.

cheers,
-j
 
The main thing that struck me was the acting. It makes it hard to follow a film if you see acting that could be improved.
 
robertwerden said:
The main thing that struck me was the acting. It makes it hard to follow a film if you see acting that could be improved.
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My primary complaint as well. That's why I recut the film and took out as much as I could of what I considered to be dead space.

If you watched both versions, which do you think is better?
 
Here are a couple points I would fix.
First raise the gain on the dialog. The music drowns it out.
The office scenes are a bit noisy. Could be the video compression though.
The scene where he pulls the paper out really needs a close up cut of the mouth and the extraction of the paper.

One thing that bothers me about the detective charachter is the fact that he is either squinting or eyebrow frowning through the entire film even though he is in a dark room. Might just be a case of over acting.

The guy running with the phone, he stumbles but we dont see why.

Where is the green glow effect coming from, her ring or her palm?

There is a boom shadow on the girls head at the end of the final scene

These are just things that jump out at me.
 
i agree with the bad acting comment. it just made me not even watch the whole thing on either because i couldnt get into it. the girl was probably the worse of them all though.... and the more you cut out the more of the story you'll probably lose. i've learned that the hard way.
 
Wow! you guys are BIOLA university students? I had a major interest in going into BIOLA for film.

I loved some of the transitions especially in the beginning. However, as many people have already said, the acting could use a bit of work. The graphics were also a bit weird.

But overall, the feel of the film was well done. The color correction and lighting were good. But the acting needs definite improvement.
 
FilmBoy77 said:
i agree with the bad acting comment. it just made me not even watch the whole thing on either because i couldnt get into it. the girl was probably the worse of them all though.... and the more you cut out the more of the story you'll probably lose. i've learned that the hard way.
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Yes, I agree. The acting is just....painfully bad. We wanted to get real actors but we didn't have time (the whole project was thrown together rather abruptly). We ended up using students at the school and I should of insisted that we delay shooting to find other actors.

Since there's nothing I can do about it now though, I tried my best to cut the unnecessary dialogue from the first 1:30 of the film to hide the bad acting. The director thinks that the 22 seconds I cut out doesn't allow the movie to build properly to the end, but in my opinion hiding the acting is more important, and I was wondering if you agree.
 
Concept89 said:
Wow! you guys are BIOLA university students? I had a major interest in going into BIOLA for film.

I loved some of the transitions especially in the beginning. However, as many people have already said, the acting could use a bit of work. The graphics were also a bit weird.

But overall, the feel of the film was well done. The color correction and lighting were good. But the acting needs definite improvement.
Click to expand...

Haha. Well don't let our poorly acted film cast a bad light on our school. There's really a lot of good stuff coming out of the university. This is just our beginning attempts.
If you go to my cut of the film and click "Back to Project" you can see a partial crew list at the bottom of the page and they're all Biola students. We're trying to get the rest of the crew on the site as well.

With a few minor details I'm really happy with the production quality of the project, I just wish the acting could have been on the same level.
 
robertwerden said:
There is a boom shadow on the girls head at the end of the final scene
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All the notes you gave are well taken, especially this one.

I probably should have fixed that. I saw the boom (or whatever it was, I think it might also be a gel blowing in the wind from outside) and I should probably remove that error from the scene.

One thing that I'm really proud of that I thought I'd point out, in the original cut the "dead" guy in the first shot of the movie is blinking! Three times his eyes move in just that first shot, so I went into After Effects and fixed it and now in my producer's cut he actually appears dead.
I've never had an interest to go into into post-production effects work, but I know enough about the subject to be useful on occasion. :)


Thanks for all your notes. All of the technical issues you mentioned we can probably fix now. Unfortunately only George Lucas has the budget to fix acting problems in post. :laugh:
 
What bothered me is the shakey handheld shots of the detective (what it looked like to me) while all the shots of the girl very steady.....and at the end it looks like you crossed the line (180 degree bla bla) from the ECU of the detectives face to the other side on the wide 2 shot when he falls over.....
 
CharlieG said:
What bothered me is the shakey handheld shots of the detective (what it looked like to me) while all the shots of the girl very steady
Click to expand...

Also drove me nuts as well. I kept saying to add that shakiness in post since we didn't get it on set. I would have done that for my cut, but I was working with a SD master and I didn't want to lose more resolution.

When I get an HD master, I'll add the shake.


.....and at the end it looks like you crossed the line (180 degree bla bla) from the ECU of the detectives face to the other side on the wide 2 shot when he falls over.....
Click to expand...
We did, but it was an intentional shot. I never found that 180-cross shot to be distracting to the screen direction or awkward on the eyes.

Thanks for the feedback.
 
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