CLUSTER Short Film

thefilmaddict

thefilmaddict

Veteran
I directed a short film in the summer.

We used a Varicam and the HVX200. Both cameras did a great job.

It may take some time to load, but I would love for you to check it out. Perhaps let it load in the background while you do other things.

WARNING: THERE ARE SPOILERS IN SOME OF THE REPLIES BELOW. PLEASE WATCH THE FILM BEFORE READING ON!

http://www.morrisbrothersfilms.com/clustershortfilm.html
 
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Oh man... just thought I'd watch the first bit to see if I would bother letting it load the whole thing out... you've got me hooked! Looks well shot so far, and the blood nose thing really shocked me... makes me want to watch the whole thing!

brb, I'll let u know when I finish watching it!

OK, I just finished it and wow. There were a few things in it that were kind of weird to me.. like the cutting back and forth of the dialog between the brother and sister... I just thought the framing was a little weird.. maybe it should have been over the shoulder instead of just one shot CU of them. BUT, other than that, the good far out weighed the negatives. I really liked the reflection of the brothers face in the blood when he was laying on the ground.. thought that was awesome. I really liked the exterior shots... they looked beautiful. I loved how the brother was walking up the stairs at the end.. especially the half lit, half dark face part when he was getting towards the top. The ending was kinda funny for me... not because you made it funny, but because of the way I interperated the film. First when I saw him aim the gun I was like "how is he going to shoot him..." and then you cut to the light moving from the vibrations and I was kinda disappointed we didn't get to see a whole bunch of blood fly from his head (you could have used blood packs.. who knows!?)... and then the second gun shot I thought the brother was just making sure the job was done... you know, so the guy won't come back. But then a second later I let out a "oooooh, he killed himself...". I guess both interperations are valid because you did leave it sort of up in the air, but I am guessing your intention was to have him shoot the guy then himself.. in reference to the line where the brother said something along the lines of doing something first before he could deal with himself.

So yeah... overall I really enjoyed your film. It was VERY well done. I guess I may as well be the first to ask... what settings? did you use lights for exterior shots?
 
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Zeakio,

Thanks for the review. It was a fun project to work on, but we had a super low budget. That meant doing the film in a very short amount of time. This leads to compromise.

The scene with the brother and sister I wish I could shoot again, but we did not have the time. We shot that at the end of the day and the sun was going down. I should have shot that earlier when we would have had more time and light to work with and when the actors were rested. That was a scheduling mistake. I felt like we were going in the wrong direction in that scene on the set, but I had to keep going in order to get the scene in the can.

I am happy with the end product overall. I am proud of the actors and the crew. Everyone worked very hard for little or no money. I learned a lot and look forward to the next project.

We used the cine D or V setting (I forget). We shot it as flat as possible (low contrast) and messed with the look in post. I used a bleach bypass filter in FCP. It degrades the image, but I think it fits the tone of the film. We did not light the exterior shots (maybe a bounce card here and there).

We left the story open when we could. We leave it up to the viewer to decide the ending.

Thanks!
 
Thanks for the details. Yeah, I'd be very proud of the film if I were you... any plans for it? festivals? youtube? dvd?
 
We entered some festivals. I hope we make it into a few. Festivals are tough these days. A lot of the big festivals want short films to be shorter and more experimental. A lot of short films that make it into the big festivals have stars in them! It's kind of hard to compete. We will have to see what happens. Thanks for the comments!

If you interested, I have a bunch of comedy shorts on our site. You may need to view them after watching our dark film, CLUSTER, to cheer yourself up!

http://www.morrisbrothersfilms.com/shortfilms.html
 
awesome man - really professional stuff. Great staging and compositiong. yay!
 
Thanks, Moog!

I spent a lot of time planning. Preproduction goes a long way when you don't have much shooting time.

I spent a lot of time casting the actors, too. None were paid, but if you audition, audition and audition, you can find dedicated people who are good. It makes all the difference.
 
The current score is made up of canned music. I think to finish the film, I need to find a composer to create an original score. I think this will help tie the film together.

The current music could be divided into 2 categories. The first is movie type music created with orchestra sounds/real instruments.

The second type is made up of drones and artificial sounds (perhaps synth created). I used the synth as a subtle bed for intense moments and to also help create a sound for the CLUSTER headaches.

I have a few composers considering working on this project for the experience and to use the film as a calling card. I figure that they can use the current soundtrack as a guide (I think that the music has the right pacing and mood).

My question to you guys on DVXuser is DO YOU LIKE THE CURRENT MUSIC? Is it the right direction for the composer to go in?

Thanks!
 
Very professional looking piece. Obviously you had a talented shooter and a good eye for visual storytelling. I also liked your location choices, overall... it's always nice to see the texture of places that aren't L.A.!

Unfortunately, I don't have the same glowing review of the other aspects. The performances were far and away the low point to me... your leads didn't feel like they were committed to the characters in their own heads. Particularly in the scene between brother and sister, everything felt canned, overly rehearsed. It seemed like they had a certain reluctance to get into the scene, like they felt it was corny. It made it hard to buy into these characters during a critical moment. Before that, "**** you, house!" made me laugh... and I immediately recognized that laughter was an inappropriate reaction - or, more likely, an appropriate reaction to an inappropriate action by your character.

As the movie moved along I felt the performances gained a bit of subtlety and depth, but at the same time I started to wonder what I'm watching. We've all seen plenty of family revenge tales, and this one seems to move at a feature film pace on a short film timeline. I was hoping, given the tease at the opening, that the headaches would provide a cool twist or add meaning to this type of story, but ultimately it seems to have no real bearing on the story you're actually telling. In fact, I found that to be a distraction from the emotional core of the piece. Add to that the fact that I found the voiceover grating.

However, I did watch the entire thing, which is pretty rare for a movie on the web that I have so many problems with. You certainly have created something worthwhile - it was well produced and did make me think, which is a serious step up from the vast majority of shorts.
 
Oh, to answer your question, I feel like the overall tone and pacing of the music works just fine. There were some moments where it definitely felt canned, but as long as you're on top of it!
 
Doug,

I appreciate your honesty.

I am going to kill myself now!

Just kidding.

Seriously, thanks.

It's good to hear different reactions.
 
hey man this looked great and was shot very well technically. compositing was cool too.

unfortunately i agree alot with what dougspice was saying. i didn't make it through the entire film. i felt like i didn't know what i was watching or waiting for so i started dragging the playhead further ahead to see when the action started. the VO didn't bother me, but seemed like it didn't add anything significant. i watched a little more but the acting seemed really stiff to me, like the actors were saying exactly what was on the page and weren't able to loosen up for some reason.

i didnt laugh when the girl cursed at the house, but it kinda made me roll my eyes like 'yea right'. i dont know, seemed a little over the top to be talking to a house with that much emotion, lol. as soon as the guy put the gun to his head it felt very familiar, like one of those student films where they're always doing something about suicide and of course i knew he wasn't going to pull the trigger. maybe he did later.

the girl laying in the pool of blood looked placed to me. blood on the floor with her head laying in it and no visible wounds leads me to believe she got shot or bashed in the back of the head, yet she fell backward with her legs like that?? i dont know, i watch a lot of law and order and csi but i'm not a forensics person but it caught my eye.

anyway, it looked great, the story and the acting just didn't grab me, maybe because i've seen a coupla other shorts online called Cluster dealing with a headache - one of them was on this forum last summer.
 
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I thought there were some things done very nicely and others not so well.

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What I liked:

-The look. Nicely handled exposures/CC, use of light/contrast, color palette. Focus seemed good too, but always hard to tell on downrezzed streaming clips.

-The music. I know (only because you said so) that it was "canned" but the choices were excellent. It's pretty amazing what you can do with a can nowadays (and I'm in the music business!).

-The sound. Good sound quality throughout.

-The story. It's not altogether original, but I though it was well drawn nonetheless.

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What I have problems with:

-Pacing, pacing, pacing. The film simply crawls along - almost every dialog line is delivered with excessively "pensive", sloooow pacing. Real people rarely talk that way. And closely related:

-Editing. Ditto the above. I honestly think the film would be far better if it were edited down to nearly half its length. I must confess that I started fast-forwarding about halfway through. I wanted to know where the story was going to go (good), but was unwilling to wait for it to take me there on its own terms (bad).

-Static camera. There is very, very little camera movement, which of course may have been a creative choice, but I felt that the film could have had much greater emotional impact with some artful camera motion. IMO it could have substantially offset the pacing problems and helped inform the overly slow dialog readings. I think it's simply amazing how much a moving camera, all by itself, can add to the emotional weight of a scene, even without dollys, Steadicams or jibs, although all of them are great to have when available. In the few shots where there was some motion it provided *very* welcome relief.

-Acting. There were some good moments, though the pacing and slow editing were working against it. Even so, the performances were mostly pretty "acty". By that I mean they often lacked the real, "in the moment" quality that makes a scene come to life. In fairness, this is definitely *not* easy for "affordable" actors or directors to achieve, *especially* on a sub-micro budget, but I thought it worth mentioning. And I certainly have seen *much* worse elsewhere.

I'm an actor myself, and I think one of the greatest challenges to aspiring fillmakers is to create an environment on the set in which actors can most completely "forget who they are" (to quote Shirley MacLaine), and become the character. Frankly, I'm less than pleased with virtually all of my filmed performances that I've seen thus far (in the few dozen shorts and features I've acted in) because my inexperience as an actor combined with the directors' inexperience resulted in a performance on my part that I know is well below my best. I will readily take the lion's share of responsibilty for that, but I know that more skilled directing could have helped me stay in the moment better, which is always what I find most problematic in my results.

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I hope you will take these comments in the way they were intended and not be insulted or overly bummed. I wholeheartedly applaud you for the effort you undertook, and there is a great deal to like about what you did. Hopefully my attempt at constructive criticism can be useful to you and not hurtful. Please forgive me if it was the latter.

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Otherwise, as an HVX owner I must say I'm very curious as to which shots/scenes were HVX and which were Varicam. Again, the overall look and quality of the shots were excellent, so I'd love to be able to go through it again with the HVX/Varicam comaprisons in mind to see whether any significant qualitative differences are apparent. Certainly on this first viewing, nothing stood out as less than fine looking, which would appear to be excellent news for HVX owners like me (us)!.

Thanks so much for sharing this with us and listening to our (hopefully constructive) critiques.
 
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