aifilmmaker
Active member
...
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SHORT: Afterschool; Cool. A refreshing comedy.
- Thread starter aifilmmaker
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j1clark@ucsd.edu
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Others have made some mention of the 'color', etc. personally the overall look of most scenes was 'too dark'.
But the thing that struck me the most was that your editing could have been tightened up considerably. Starting with the first intro shot. We don't need to seek the guy run, initially decapitated, across the empty area to some doors. Sure it's the title, but you could have chopped about 2-3 seconds off that, and started with the guy nearly to the doors.
Once beyond the doors (presumably...), there are sequence of 'shots' that pretty much pan back and forth... loose the pans, just chop them out... in general... anytime someone is 'just walking', cut after the last dialog utterance... or minimize to just movement at a 'door', or 'to the point were the character interact'... Modern 'editing' usually has shots on the order of a couple of 'seconds', maybe longer only if the actor is expressing some emotion. At the end of the first minute, from about 0:54 to 1:05 there is a 10 second shot while two guys walk down a hall... The pace of the two is slow, the dialog wordy, and as a finale, there's a pause where the shot has the one guy cut in half... and an empty space on the opposite side of the frame.
Others have commented on various things, 'unsteady cam', 'whacked angles'... etc.
Film is a language... and like any language, there is a use for various elements of film's language... just putting a 'whack' angle in just because... well... you can... is sort of
like suffering from Tourette Syndrome, where in the middle of some ordinary situation, a person will utter a spew of foul language... makes no sense, and people begin to
move away...
On the other hand... the whack angles could be due to the mostly if not always use of 'hand held'... Tripods were invented for a reason... and despite the frequent 'handheld' look
of certain modern shows and movies... in most cases those are done with a steadycam and not because the cameraman is jumping around to get a shot... ok, simulated news coverage
may be exactly that... but not for most films...
Framing...
One fo the essential elements of camera work is composition. On a number of shots, the actors were placed on one side of the frame, and there was a vast expanse of 'emptiness' on the other. Again the visual language has that in the vocabulary, but the use in this film was 'unmotivated'...
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On the topic of dialog in shorts. Recently I read two scripts and 90% of the pages of each was 'dialog'... To me that is not a 'movie', that is a Radio Broadcast, with a bit of visual assistance. I think most 'short' films can have their dialog cut significantly, and still get the story by visual means.
There are some writers, Tarrantino being one popular one, who can 'spew' dialog galore and it seems to 'work' in many cases... for lesser lights the results is a significant negative.
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Recommendations... reshoot the film, with an eye to edit the script down, and the shots down to the significant elements that get the story told. On one of the Hitchcock disks I have, his basic statement about 'people moving across the room', is 'its boring, and unnecessary'.
Also, think about converting to monochrome to avoid problems with 'white balance'...
In previous posts you mentioned doing a 'feature'... while doing a feature may be something for 'ego gratification', I think doing 3-5 short films, such that each one develops a particular element of filmmaking, would be superior than trying to do a 'feature'. If at the end of summer you have 5 or so shorts, patch them together and call the result "Highschool Stories"... Big wigs in the business have done that with films like "New York Stories"(1989), so you could follow suit.
robotsound
Well-known member
I just wanted to say that I think it's good that you are asking other people for feedback. You certainly got plenty of that here in this thread!
I didn't see a link to watch the movie in your post, so I have not seen your film. Therefore, most of the things I am saying here is general advice to someone in high school, rather than addressing your film in particular.
A mistake that many people in creative enterprises make, is that they just assume whatever they did is great and can't really be improved on. The fact that you're looking to grow as a filmmaker puts you ahead of a lot of folks right off the bat.
I made quite a few videos back in high school. When I look at what I know now compared to what I knew then... I shake my head in disbelief. Lucky for you this is 2011 and you have the internet.
This isn't strictly related to your film in particular, but I would recommend picking up a copy of Sidney Lumet's book, Making Movies. It's my single favorite book that I've read on filmmaking. I just found out recently that it's Darren Aronofsky's favorite book on filmmaking as well.
This book really gets to the heart of filmmaking. All the technical stuff is important, in that if you mess that up the quality will suffer. However, the book primarily deals with the higher level artistic concepts of filmmaking, without getting too "out there". It's a great general overview and offers a great perspective.
I knew a lot of technical stuff when I was your age. I could reel up a 1" U-matic video tape machine. I could set up a 3CCD ENG camera up to color bars using a CCU. I knew how to use a hardware based edit controller to do linear tape based editing. Fast forward 10-20 years, and almost all of that stuff is irrelevant to me now making digital films in HD. The manual photography knowledge never went out of date though.
Here are some things that I didn't even know I should be thinking about when I was your age, but if I had known them my projects would have been improved:
1) It is better to attempt something more modest, and do it well, than to attempt something too ambitious and fail. There can be a tendency to let a project, especially at your age, become a parody of itself.
2) Exercise subtlety and restraint whenever you get a new toy or learn a new technique. If you ever saw the episode of The Simpsons where Homer was editing a video and uses the star wipe for every transition, this is exactly what I'm talking about. The same thing goes for camera angles, Photoshop filters, (overuse of ) guitar effects pedals, unusual spices in cooking, and almost anything else you can think of.
3) Some people will say "just go out and shoot, and don't worry too much about all the details". To me, this is kind of like saying "just get up on stage with an unfamiliar instrument and start hitting notes". You need a plan. Have one overarching idea or theme for your film. Plan every single scene. Plan every single shot within each scene. You can always deviate from your plan, but if you have no plan, you're dead.
4) Think about what you are trying to communicate. Making a film is a process of encoding an idea into a series of moving pictures, and then successfully having your viewing audience decode the moving pictures back into your original message, in an entertaining fashion.
Good luck!
I didn't see a link to watch the movie in your post, so I have not seen your film. Therefore, most of the things I am saying here is general advice to someone in high school, rather than addressing your film in particular.
A mistake that many people in creative enterprises make, is that they just assume whatever they did is great and can't really be improved on. The fact that you're looking to grow as a filmmaker puts you ahead of a lot of folks right off the bat.
I made quite a few videos back in high school. When I look at what I know now compared to what I knew then... I shake my head in disbelief. Lucky for you this is 2011 and you have the internet.
This isn't strictly related to your film in particular, but I would recommend picking up a copy of Sidney Lumet's book, Making Movies. It's my single favorite book that I've read on filmmaking. I just found out recently that it's Darren Aronofsky's favorite book on filmmaking as well.
This book really gets to the heart of filmmaking. All the technical stuff is important, in that if you mess that up the quality will suffer. However, the book primarily deals with the higher level artistic concepts of filmmaking, without getting too "out there". It's a great general overview and offers a great perspective.
I knew a lot of technical stuff when I was your age. I could reel up a 1" U-matic video tape machine. I could set up a 3CCD ENG camera up to color bars using a CCU. I knew how to use a hardware based edit controller to do linear tape based editing. Fast forward 10-20 years, and almost all of that stuff is irrelevant to me now making digital films in HD. The manual photography knowledge never went out of date though.
Here are some things that I didn't even know I should be thinking about when I was your age, but if I had known them my projects would have been improved:
1) It is better to attempt something more modest, and do it well, than to attempt something too ambitious and fail. There can be a tendency to let a project, especially at your age, become a parody of itself.
2) Exercise subtlety and restraint whenever you get a new toy or learn a new technique. If you ever saw the episode of The Simpsons where Homer was editing a video and uses the star wipe for every transition, this is exactly what I'm talking about. The same thing goes for camera angles, Photoshop filters, (overuse of ) guitar effects pedals, unusual spices in cooking, and almost anything else you can think of.
3) Some people will say "just go out and shoot, and don't worry too much about all the details". To me, this is kind of like saying "just get up on stage with an unfamiliar instrument and start hitting notes". You need a plan. Have one overarching idea or theme for your film. Plan every single scene. Plan every single shot within each scene. You can always deviate from your plan, but if you have no plan, you're dead.
4) Think about what you are trying to communicate. Making a film is a process of encoding an idea into a series of moving pictures, and then successfully having your viewing audience decode the moving pictures back into your original message, in an entertaining fashion.
Good luck!
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It's better to make a short of 1 minute which is extremly good, then a "feature" film of 90minutes which is...boring.....
And as said before, every single shot, every item (prop) in a shot, how doors go open, the color of the door, the color of walls, how extra's are standing, what extra's are doing...it's all planned before.
Walking shots are never needed, unless they're the "guideline" to something amazing or suspense... Like for example a first shot of a guy in a house, hiding... a girl walking to that house. In that case a walking shot of the girl, approaching could be suspens. Maybe with elements we knew from before (like a shop she passes and we've seen that shop is 1 street further or so)...
Soundwise I would recommend "dont let them make sound that are not needed". And the school was "empty" (in the film) but there were some voices in the back...
And as said before, every single shot, every item (prop) in a shot, how doors go open, the color of the door, the color of walls, how extra's are standing, what extra's are doing...it's all planned before.
Walking shots are never needed, unless they're the "guideline" to something amazing or suspense... Like for example a first shot of a guy in a house, hiding... a girl walking to that house. In that case a walking shot of the girl, approaching could be suspens. Maybe with elements we knew from before (like a shop she passes and we've seen that shop is 1 street further or so)...
Soundwise I would recommend "dont let them make sound that are not needed". And the school was "empty" (in the film) but there were some voices in the back...