What makes a student film look like a student film?

Doc Bernard said:
All I got to say is: Just because it's a "Student Film", don't blow it off just because of that.

The last 2 "Student Films" I worked, (one as a Producer, the other as tech advisor/armorer) were freaking amazing.

One of them is in the festival circuit and has been garnering some major awards and festival inclusions and has IMDB listing. The other (most recent) is set to hit the targeted festival at the beginning of next month. Extreme production value and assets involved in both.

Look, yesterday's definition of a student film is outdated.
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Doc Bernard brings up a good point. I read this thread days ago and read it during a rough time throuhg a shoot. It discouraged me for a while (few hours) then I realize it did cause most of what everyone is saying here is correct. Before I cast my vote for what makes an 'amateur' film look like an amateur film, I'd like to elaborate on what DB said.

I think (aside from ALL aesthetics and such) the thing that makes a student film look like a student film is that before you watch it, it's EXPOSED as a student film.

I mean, this is a bit far fetched but in hopes of making a point, If someone were to shoot and direct Jack nicholson and Anthony Hopkins having a heated and bad-ass argument, for like thirty minutes, on a Nokia 15fps cam, it would sell for a bout 3 bucks. And tons of people would watch, because of two things, Jack Nicholson and Hopkins are amazing actors (provided it was written well), and because they are Nicholson and Hopkins.

I'm not saying get A-listers and it'll save your film, but don't set up too much if you want the honest reaction. Here, we've got the 'aire' of a 'real' movie defined by it being american. If it's american, and we get it on tv a year late, and there's arabic subtitles underneath, it's real. No one we know did it, therefore we're not watching from a point of view where we can freely criticize, we just give in and enjoy it a whole lot more.

I'm betting that if some of these movies were not exposed as student films, we would judge a bit differently.

Also, not all student films are bad. I've seen quite a bunch of first timers do a wonderful job. To call all student films bad is just discouraging.

Bad elements are bad elements, this was SUCH a useful thread, but it really took some fight out of me when I read it. It was like, this was helpful, but nobody here is nice, not that nice is the point.

Still, I did get into this to have some fun, and having fun doesn't mean skimping necessarily.

Regardless of my sensitivity, I went through that whole checklist and should very well condemn myself to death for pulling off more than half those moves. I am working hard to correct them, and hope what I'm shooting doesn't fall into this category.

My vote, most most most influential, and what can probably save anything more than anything else is good acting.

Sound has always been huge in my book. Breathes life into things, always neglected, as least from what I see here in Beirut.

White walls, if not intended (asylum, hospital, and even those have a characteristic to them that screams 'i did this on purpose') kill me.

Steady and eloquent camera movement. If your camera just glides seamlessly all over the place, you no longer notice that you're looking through an object a human being is holding. And, when you cut, it's something you feel. Different ways of going from frame to frame can make the audience appreciate and feel a hard cut.

So my two cents, it's bad acting, and static shot - cut - static shot - cut - static shot - cut - cut -cut cut cut cut cut....

That's what I wouldn't do.
 
Also... nobody stutters, nobody screws up, nobody looks for the word in character, nobody interrupts anyone else during a conversation or a fight too. That's painful. When people talk, it's a mess, a mess that everyone can follow. To duplicate this mess is daunting. Cause if you don't, coupled with nothing but cuts, you get

Line - cut - line - cut - line - cut - line - cut - puch - cut - ow - cut - puch back - cut etc
 
I think (aside from ALL aesthetics and such) the thing that makes a student film look like a student film is that before you watch it, it's EXPOSED as a student film.
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Greymog, good point. The perception influences the.......well........the perception. If we go into a premiere with a predisposed attitude.......it will live up (or down) to our expectations.
 
Doc Bernard said:
Greymog, good point. The perception influences the.......well........the perception. If we go into a premiere with a predisposed attitude.......it will live up (or down) to our expectations.
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It's scary how much it does. I mean, the mona lisa is gonna feel different at the louvre than it is on a tourist's t-shirt is kind of the logic I'm following.

The thing I'm learning more than anything is the true test of one's film should be showing it to someone who hasn't received any 'setup'.

I can say what makes a student film (or amateur film) look like an amateur film is the 15 minute lecture given before the filmmaker hits play.

Just hit play.
 
Perfect attitude!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Love it. Let it stand on it's own.

Wow. Thank you for that. It actually helps me come to grips with issues I have been dealing with on a realism level.

Again, thank you. (I know you have no idea what I am talking about)
 
Been thinking hard about this subject, and I feel I need to expound a bit to explain my position.


It all comes down to psycho-acoustics. An actor being filmed in an open space (like in a wheat field) cannot sound they are recording VO in a booth. It destroys the illusion of film-making, which is the "suspenion of disbelief" Same as filming the actor in a closet and making it sound like they are in an open field. Or having a quiet noise floor during non-dialogue sequences, but when there is dialogue, there is heavy BG noise. Or the exact opposite. Sure, the dialogue is the same, but how it is presented is another issue entirely.

Destroy that psycho-acoustic coupling to the visual, you lose the connection to the viewer because they are now mentally confused.

"The actor is surrounded by explosions and gunfire but why can't I hear that grenade that just blew his left leg off....and what the hell was that noise????? He sounds like he tracked this with a tape recorder in the bathroom and flushed the toilet"

And in the end, you definitely do NOT want your viewer to be confused. You want an end result that leaves your viewer understanding your message, whatever it is. A trained sound engineer and boom op can get you the recordings you need to complete your project properly. Rotation of the mic at the right time and in the right situation, can add a dimension you never even thought of on the audio front.

And which (IMO) explains what I am trying to say.
 
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Take it from someone who once found hundreds of film festival DVD submissions in a dumpster, took them home and watched all the ones that worked: there seems to be 4 archetypal student films:

"Airsoft Hitmen": A cast of 18-25 year olds playing gangsters/hitmen while wearing stupid hats and trenchcoats who speak in cliches and smoke (what appear to be) their first cigarettes in over-lit apartment hallways.

"Purple Poets Contemplate their Navels": A cast of 18-25 year olds playing depressed characters in depressing situations that end depressingly. Usually suicide-based. Often hilarious.

"It's experimental, maaaaan": A cast of 18-25 year olds running through fields and forests intercut with out of focus everyday objects, a chainlink fence, maybe the sun, or some more fields, maybe another chainlink fence, or a close up of a dripping faucet, none of it means anything but the "auteur" behind it will no doubt swear to some underlining message.

"Foul Mouthed F**ks Discuss Poop and Sex": A cast of 18-25 year olds playing non-characters who swear every other word while brazenly discussing sex and various bodily excretions. Never hilarious.

EDIT: Almost forgot! Extra (lame) points awarded for:

Using Sigor Ros or Explosions in the Sky for the score.

Starting the film with an alarm clock waking someone up.

Including numerous close-ups/cutaways of/to a house cat.

Having the gall to call your non-existent production company a "studio"

Ending the film with "fin" when you're not French.
 
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Lets not forget.

1.) Hand held
2.) Unearned Charachter Profanity
3.) Flickering Florescent lights
4.) 4 min film 2 minutes of credits
5.) Overcrank Everything
6.) White balance optional
 
There's actually a film - commercially released and distributed - that I saw on cable a while back, that hits just about every one of the high points:

Set on a college campus
Characters read philosophy texts aloud in dialog
Characters are film/media students
Characters are in a romantic triangle
Heroine (for lack of a better word) has to cope with weird screwy faculty members in order to get credits-to-graduate straightened out
Unmotivated profanity
Unmotivated sex
Plot? Not if you define the word as a sequence of related events leading to a narrative climax, no, not really.

More than anything it looks like -and almost certainly is - a student film perpetrated by someone whose family had the excess of money and deficit of sense to finance the gods-awful thing to feature length and either bribe or threaten someone into releasing it...

...I should try and find the title. It's a magnificent how-not-to...

Doc Bernard and I were recently at a UCLA screening wherein one of the showcased items was similarly a set-on-college-campus-predictable-slice-of-college-life-with-the-usual-stock-characters-type exercise. Although compared to the thing I saw on cable, that UCLA project was f'ing Shakespeare...
 
I see way too many dealing with drugs, suicide, and guns, a lot of times by people who know really nothing about these subjects personally. They just know cliches from other source material, and then rehash these cliches in even more cliched ways -- that's bad!

I think looking at a lot of the student work I saw, and even some of what I made, time is also a problem. Too long. Not enough editing. One of my early student films was 12 minutes long when I think the story only supports like 3-4 minutes. It could have been told way faster. Having a character walk here, walk there, and meander around, it was very poorly edited. You can't have 20 seconds of a character sitting alone on a sidewalk either. It's just boring. Maybe you could get away with that in a feature with a really interesting camera move and some amazing lighting, but not in a student short.

Awful sound, that's a definite note people made here that happens frequently. It's an afterthought, basically.

I've seen some very good student shorts, though, too. Ones with TV star actors and solid working professionals in all of the positions, done by promising and talented upcoming DPs, shot on 35mm or professional HD cameras like the Sony F950, RED, etc. There's a lot of crap out there, but there are also some really good works done too.

My feeling is if you're in your 3rd and final year of graduate school and you can't make a killer short, you're never going to make a good film. I'm sorry but that's a LONG time to spend in school, after college, not to be able to make something good. When I think "student short" I think early student short, like I did at the start of film school or in high school or college just messing around. But graduate film school students doing thesis projects very often turn out good to great work, especially technically. It's demanded at top institutions like USC, Chapman, NYU, etc. They usually have a firm handle on technical details and they have large crews, some professionals peppered in there, to help them get the look and sound they want. Usually professional actors of a certain level clamor to get on those shoots, too, because there is a lot of equipment and money involved, and they know if they get a lead role in a good student short it could help them out. Not saying a feature film star is going to give two craps about a student short, no matter how good, but a solid working actor who has landed supporting gigs on TV shows that have lasted 1-2 seasons, or someone working in commercials and corporate work, may be very happy to get a lead role in a student short.
 
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