A Fedora and a .44

M

MikeZas

Active member
We tried to make this in time for Hero fest, but instead learned the valuable lesson when making a movie, everything will take 20 times longer than you think it will.

http://zas.illemonati.com/FMAN_forweb.mov

So it's finally finished. If you saw this during hero fest, give it another chance, it's almost unrecognizable now. Or at least, for a bunch of kids doing this for the first time, it's not terrible.

Some screen caps:

yeah.jpg

Fman.jpg

yep.jpg


A bit of background - a friend of mine got a DVX100a last fall, and I've been bugging him about it ever since. Finally, he decided to let me have it for a weekend in May, which leads to the question, well, now I've got this great camera, what am I gonna do with it? So I was checking DVXuser, and BAM, hero fest. Now I'm a music guy, and my entry into the film world is very, very recent (sometime around a year ago), but I still thought to myself, deadline in less than a month? No problem! So I call up my script writing buddy, he wrote the script, we made the movie (or tried at least), and then we're finished. Only we're not really finished, because what we ended up with was a very unsatisfying rough cut. So we've worked on it since then, shot a few pick ups here and there, spent a long time on editing, music, and sound, and this is the result. Like I said, it's not great (particularly the acting - it's just some friends of ours - and I read a comment over in the thread for the Countdown movie that the young actors playing older people was very distracting - well this is even worse!), but at the very least I can can now say it's the best we could do at the time.
 
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This was pretty good for a first movie. The acting wasn't great but I wasn't expecting academy award winning performances. From a technical standpoint, I thought the sound was well done, except the gunshots seemed a little off. They sounded too much like a sound effect, and so did the punching sounds. But the dialogue was very clear.
I would have liked the camera point of view scenes to really look like we were looking through the lens of his still camera. I would have shot them hand held, and included all meters and markings that are seen when looking through a DSLR. I also think some nice muzzle flashes would have spruced up the gunshot scenes. This movie could really benefit from some After Effects work, push it to the next level. This is a lot better than the first movies I made. Look forward to your next one.

-Kevin
 
Hey how's it goes?

Were the jumps between black and white done for a reason? The switches between felt very natural. Where as the narrative wasn't perfect, it had it's holes and fair amount of cheese, i though you guys did a good job getting down a splintered timeline. I know your done with it, but i think it would maybe be interesting to move some more scenes around.

Another suggestion i would have is to drop the two 15 minutes later things. I admit i have used it in the past, but it is a crutch. If you do a slow fade away to black and let it rest at black for a second or two (w/out the 15 min thing) the audience will be given the feeling of waiting, time will feel its going by, and the antisipation will grow. But for the second 15 min later i think it might be enough to just cut the two scenes it breaks up together. The audience gets that the hench men brought him there. You don't need to take them out of it by telling them it took 15 minutes to do so.

The only character that i wasn't really feeling in the movie had to be your lone ranger with the fedora. Nobody is that infallable in a noir. I understand in such a small amount of time you don't have time to develope such a character but he was just too super. And at times he definitely felt a little michael jackson-ish. I started humming thriller half way through.

I hope this doesnt sound like i'm buring your movie, i'm just trying to give that constructive critizism. I definitely think this peice is a move in the right direction an would like to see your work progress.

I was going to post a bunch more about noir tips, but i'm sure you'd know a lot of em already.
 
If nothing else, it's a cool title. I'm waiting for it to load now, so we'll see. Nice hat too... where'd you find it?
 
Ok... having watched it, I will agree with the others- the acting is pretty bad. But, you are amature kids, so that is to be expected. On to the actual movie- the little transition with the punch was cool, but not cool enough to do it twice. I also liked the scene with the hat and gun on the table. It was a bit of a stretch, but cool none the less. I feel it should have been shot in either B&W or Color, but to switch back and forth was pointless. I think it would have been more fitting to do it in B&W.
 
I've just seen your short for the second time (I've already seen it during the herofest) and I bear out my first impressions: I like your movie!
I agree with epsilonbass about the 15minutes-later things, but in general it is very good! I liked the genre mixture (noir above all, comedy, hero), the way you looked at the same scene a few times and the last scene in a particular way. About the acting, maybe are the voices the real problem... I mean: I'm italian and I don't understand very well the tone of the voices in english... The acting for my eyes wasn't so bad!

Just a thing: I noticed that there is always air between punches, kicks and faces. Obviously you don't have to hit your friends, but using prospective and z99 (tele) you could obtain a better look.

Ciao!
 
Thanks for your feedback everyone!
For the black and white to color, well, it was to try to give Fedoraman some slightly heroic qualities, seeing as we did this for herofest and all. I can understand why that doesn't come across though, and if we did it again, I'd probably do it all black and white.
 
If you wanted to give him heroic qualities, just shoot him from a slightly lower angle, making him appear larger than life. All the shifting back and forth did was leave viewers confused. And adjust his hat please? Having it down over his eyes was just annoying ;)
 
Well hey, thanks for your well thought out, constructive feedback. Next time you put a lot of time and effort into something, I'll make sure to return the favor.
 
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Haha, sorry to keep bring up this crap, but i'm currently procrastinating on a film noir paper due in 8 hours... so all my studying, instead of writing in word and completing my paper, i'm flushing it all into here.

The problem is that for using noir for hero fest your protagonist, should infact be the anti-heroic hero. While i do think that some of that stuck, in that his actions were more of the rebel, and used for his own personal gain, noir is about the existential. It's there to present a world where everyone is f'cked from the getgo. And most of the time, the protagonist is the one taking the largest bite out of the sh't sandwich. Noir has a character that has lost control of his surroundings, making his moves out of desperation or in trying to connect with someone in their aiienated world.

What am i getting at here? I dunno, that a noir film is everything that the traditional sense of a hero isnt?

haha, quick quote from the 'film noir reader':

The word "hero" never seems to fit the noir protagonist, for his world is devoid of the moral framework necessary to produce the traditional hero. He has been wrenched from familiar moorings, and is a hero only in the modern sense in whwich that word has been prgressively redefined to fit the existential bias of contemporary fiction.

haha, I dunno i just find this crap interesting, so dunno if this helps you in any way. but yeah.
 
since you are talking about noir, a little bit advertising:

"see my first short, a noir movie" :cheesy:

link in the signature :dankk2:
 
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