Proving Grounds - Short Comedy

B

BradCube

Member
Hi All,

Just thought I would share a short comedy called "Proving Grounds" we put together for a film festival here in Australia recently. Unfortunately we weren't short listed but we will continue to submit the film to a few different festivals to see if we can get some exposure.

I was the editor/grader/compositor for the piece. The cast and crew were all relatively young, I don't think anyone would be over 30 and I myself am 20.

We shot it on an EX1 and edited in Premiere Pro CS4. It would be great to get some feedback from an international audience such as yourselves :)

I've thrown a copy of the film up on my website, so you can take a look at it there:
http://www.ntertained.com.au/provinggrounds.htm

Cheers,
Brad
 
(Spoilers)

Heya,

Here are my thoughts on your film. Of course some of these comments are on the direction etc, but I'll throw them in anyway. Congratulations for getting it done, any film, even short films are difficult to put together.

Firstly, I didn't like the subject nature of the work, some might disagree but it didn't really work for me. I didn't find this too funny. Of course, it is very difficult doing short comedy. It's tough. The characters didn't work for me though.

The opening shows that we're in a "middle of nowhere" location. Okay, cool. But then you cut to that master shot a few more times I think unnecessarily. The cut when they're talking about location was fine but the one on "love your work" was a bit out of place to me, it kind of distances us from the characters and that's not good if we're trying to find them funny or people we can sort of relate to.

That sort of techno music was really out of place for me. I've seen this in 10000000000 short films. Random out of place beats. Don't get me wrong, it works when it works, but in this scene, it feels really weird coming in like that then just suddenly fading out. Something a little more ambient (but not like ambient pads!) would have worked here, you can be as suspenseful as you like, some low intense strings would have worked better IMO, if you're going to have music there. A nice big crescendo on the knife shot, the brass is fine too, that was good, but the beat stuff is out there.

The guy telling the other guy what to do looked at his watch, and seemed to think they were in a bit of a hurry, but at the beginning of the short he's making a weird remark about the car. If he had something to say about the car, he would have said it when they first got it in it, ie, before we meet the characters.

When the guy shoots the gun, the close up shows the flash going off before the sound effect, that was a strange cut. I would have kept it in like a medium shot, maybe go in for a quick close up of the guy getting shot to see his reaction, or the other guy thinking "oh shi* what have I done!?". We need to see some body language from the guy who fired the gun. The close up comes but then the gun shoots and it feels weird and un natural. It's also a bit out of character for the other guy to be grabbing the gun like that and fighting over it. At the beginning of the short he is introduced to us as the guy in charge, a guy who apparently has made kills before, but then he goes around grabbing a loaded gun like that, why would he do that?

Overall, this film is pretty good, I am not trying to deliberately pick out every single detail, but I'm trying to give you a full honest opinion about what I think didn't work for next time. :)

There definitely were some moments I enjoyed between the characters, especially the guy not knowing what to do etc. But to me they needed way more punch.

We find out why the girl was there, but I actually felt more for the girl than I did for your other characters, even though she didn't say a word, which I am sure was not your intent.

I think it would have worked really well if they were under a bit more pressure time wise, cutting the lines about the car, more reasons as to why they were out in the middle of nowhere with a knives and a gun, etc. etc.

Cool ending credits sequence, great job.

Anyway good luck, and I look forward to seeing the next one.

Peace.
 
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I enjoyed it. I agree the music could have been a bit different.

The gun shot was too obvious when they were fidgeting around.

It was missing something (not sure what), but over all I enjoyed it.
 
Thanks so much for that feedback guys.

I will pass a lot of that onto the director as I wasn't personally responsible for the majority of stuff that was mentioned. I'm sure he will be very appreciative :)
 
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