SINNERGY - Geoff Reisner

This is a very attractive moody film, with beautiful cinematography and effective performances.

The story is fairly effective - but hardly original - this is the weak point for me really. We have here the classic tale of a dead kid tortured noir cop - almost resembling by a whisker Rosarch from 'The Watchmen' in language, style, theme etc.

I think greater attention should have been paid to the fundamental concept for the film, and ensuring that while retaining the language, and style of noir, a more original take and spin was placed on the story. The monster is not original enough for this to be be distuingished as much as it should (for sake of its other oustanding qualities) as something of a homage/copy of other recent pop cultural noir figures like Rosarch etc.

This is not really what you want your audience to think, oh this is just like that or this. That said this is a technical, well written and well performed / produced film. So it really surprises me (and of course its only my opinion) that such an injury to the films originality was allowed to persist.
 
I agree with Lawrie that the film is a technical, well written and well performed / produced film with beautiful cinematography.

This film is full of chlichés, but I think that isn't a problem - obviously you wanted to do a film like this and it worked. What I really missed, are the sparks and the twist. Seeing that it was made very professionally, I feel that it is a pity. This could have been a masterpiece, but I have to admit that the film didn't hold my attention.

Susanne
 
Amazing job Geoff. I'm impressed. The story was a bit obscure, but in a cool David Lynch kind of way. This is definitely one of my favorites of the fest.
 
Some BTS here... the room where the detectives find the girl is actually my room. We cleared most of my stuff out and put in fake drywall and other miscellaneous bits to make it fit better with the building we had access to.

I wish we'd taken some stills of the before/after but I had too much on my mind. Here's some test shots we did (the night prior to adding the drywall) with the GH1 and anamorphics. You can see how ultra wide the frame is prior to the crop...

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Some stills from that set...
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I actually left the boards up while we shot this scene and it's in the corner of one of the shots with Archy....

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Matty and Kholi setting up the shot...

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Small space. Very cramped. Wish we had a few more feet to get a little wider...
 
More BTS....

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Working out the scene with Andy Brosseau...

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Matt Garrett, Tim Hyten and Matt Parra checking out a shot. There was a lot of trial and error with the running bits as we had to get the right pacing to get a smooth shot and also the frame line for boom.

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Matty, Tim and I setting up for a shot in the alleyway, our biggest scene. This was a tough location... no permits obviously and we had a bunch of different setups to pull off. We had to move fast in case some cops showed up and kicked us out. That kind of pressure sucks on a big scene. Permits are great if you have the budget for it.

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Having a flid out LCD is extremely handy for steadicam work with the GH1.

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The crew at the bar... Almost lost this location on the day of... the guy who owns the location wouldn't wake up (the producer and I spent an hour banging on his door) and then he was drunk/hung over and didn't remember us at first. He then proceeded to watch us intently the entire time and rushed us out an hour and a half earlier than expected. Great guy!
 
Wow. Amazing look. The bar location was super. Great acting. This deserves a longer, more fleshed out story. The noir style was executed nicely. Well, done and congrats.
 
I thought I wrote a comment in this thread. Many have beat me to the primary criticisms so I'll attempt to not to repeat them.

I don't think you can avoid the noir-ish pigeon hole you put this film in... with the black and white photography, melodramatic performances, gumshoe vo and the Mike Hammer-like lead character. l love all of it. The alley chase and too much VO are sticky points to contend with, as mentioned by others, but you kept an interesting dark mood throughout. This story bears more examination and remains a tall order for 6 mins. I'm still loving it. Watched it twice. I didn't do that with many of the fest films.
 
Hey Geoff, finally getting around to checking out the entries...

This was beautifully shot. Everything just melded together and nothing was out of place. The VO was perfect and I wouldn't change a thing about it. VO's are really a staple of the noir genre and it really helped to sell that.

As for performances, I think the alley scene seemed a bit forced and unnatural. But other than that, the performances worked well... especially with the voice over.
 
Geoff_R said:
In camera. I wanted to be able to see exactly what I'd be working with. Black and white is tricky because you can no longer use color as a separation medium. You have to compose your shots more carefully and work towards creating contrast using light and dark portions of the frame.
Click to expand...

Wow nice... I like the work (I know i'm late and all) the pacing was well done.
 
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