Journal #8490

Its crazy, but for some reason i liked it (must be the girl).

Your THING was good, always some space for improvement, but its good.

Delightfully cheesy. More please.

Nice~ :3

I watched the intro only, but that looked really incredible m8!

I looked at the thing and thought a thing about it.

I heard there's a character named "Striker". I wonder if he specializes in not letting others to cut him.

Eh, it's not my kind of THING. Though I did like the "You shot my phone, you dick!" line.
Given your credits, should we be remarking upon the camera-work and visual effects? =P

Don't know if it's the script of the actors but there's something about the acting that's really.. stiff. It feels like they're performing on stage rather than on the screen.

Humor isn't really up my street ( agree with jessie on the "you shot my phone you dick" was quite funny ), really good anyway for a small team.

Visual stuff was really, really good. The only reason I knew that the scene with the guy from limmy's show was CGI was the pre-prod shot of the greenscreen behind him. Those matrix-slowdown bits were really well done!

From Instant, TWHL's resident arsehole critic

"TWHL's resident arsehole critic"

Never underestimate the impact of a missing comma... I would not like that job.

I'd have thought there wouldn't be a whole lot of variety there, but if the job even exists, I guess I'm wrong.

"It feels like they're performing on stage rather than on the screen."
I fail to see how the medium has anything to do with the quality of acting.

Not bad: the effects in particular were marvellous. I feel that it does have problems as a whole though, mostly down to what I assume is the way it's been shot.

I think I'm fairly safe in saying that this was a single-camera shoot, but I may be less safe in saying that for each angle that was shot in any given scene, a full run-through of the script wasn't done - rather, the camera was set up for each of the actors and they ran through their lines individually. It feels a bit stilted as a result. There's also a lot of audio inconsistencies that contribute to that feeling as well.

It also needs a bit more creativity with the cinematography - stuff like the megaton punch sequence, for example, needs to amp up the action with close-ups, quick cutting, motion, etc, not only to make the sequence more exciting, but also to make the juxtaposition between the charge up and the result all the more funny. As it stands, you're transitioning from one static shot to another, which dulls the impact and reduces the comedy.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World does this incredibly well (in fact, every Edgar Wright film does - the guy is a friggin' master of comedic juxtaposition. I would be very surprised if Wright didn't grow up with Looney Tunes because a lot of the visual comedy techniques he does comes directly from them). Comedy is 100% about timing, and that's something that doesn't just come across in the script. It's found in editing, in audio cues, in camera movements - there's an incredible pile of tools to find comedy in a scene.

I hope this doesn't seem too harsh! Let me know if you want something clarified.

Totally disagree, Jeffmod. Stage acting is quite aware of the audience and the actors are speaking quite loudly so their voice is clearly heard in the theater, it has a huge impact on the feel and the sound of the acting. Movements and emotions are highly exaggerated so that even people in the back of the room can know what's going on.
Film acting, on the other hand, is generally supposed to feel like the audience doesn't exist, and since it's projected on the large screen with (hopefully) uniform sound around the entire theater, there's no need to cater for the size or shape of the audience.

Of course this is just my off-hand rambling, I have almost no knowledge of this stuff. AJ or Archie could explain further, I'm sure.

I suppose that in itself is a fair point.
Though the exaggeration of life that happens on stage generally tends to make the acting anything but stiff and wooden.

I totally agree with all the criticism, in particular Ant's.
This was my flatmate's final uni project and as such a lot of the crew (in particular the Director of Photography, Sound Recordist, B cam op and Assembly Editor) had zero previous experience of making this kind of programme. It's really disappointing because I think the script is actually great - it's just a lot of the jokes fall flat due to poor technique. I was given zero creative control over my camera by the DoP who had a rigid storyboard, and as you guessed it was line per line rather than scene run-throughs.

I'm fairly pleased with the VFX side of things, though the B-cam the uni provided (was originally the A-cam until I showed the DoP my camera's footage side by side with theirs) was so noisy and compressed it made even basic rotoscoping a fucking nightmare.

As for the acting, the dad in particular does indeed come from a stage background and it definitely shows. I think Rebecca who plays Lucy is great, as is Dave who plays Archeus. They both took their characters to just the right level of over-the-top, and while Phil (Mike) has moments of greatness, he also falls flat a few times ("Awww, damnit!")

From the perspective of it being a student film, I think it's actually pretty high quality, but I'm definitely gutted it's not as good as it could have been.

I get really heavily into a director's mindset, particularly when I watch student films, and find all these things that I would've done completely differently had it been my film. The constant trap that I see student films get into is trying to be overly ambitious, which always results in efforts that are stretched far too thin across multiple aspects of the production.

My half-assed theory behind this is that the tools and equipment needed to create something vast in scale have become incredibly accessible to a wider audience. It becomes less about cutting and altering a script or shot to suit the resources that are on hand and more about just cramming everything in because the tools are on hand. The Spielbergs and Abrams of the day had nothing but constraints to work against, which necessitated an alteration in scope. Most of the time, these constraints actually worked to their benefit as they could focus more of their effort on other aspects of a now smaller production (this also supports my theory that giving a director unlimited and unfettered scope results in a much weaker result - Avatar, the Hobbit trilogy, the Star Wars prequels).

Furthermore, their diet of films was completely different to ours. They were raised on films that valued the subtle: character interactions and minimalistic filmmaking were key. They learnt about pacing, tension, visual comedy, framing, staging because that's all those films had. We were raised on, well, Spielberg, where visual spectacle takes over and a lot of students tend to gloss over the intricacies of what's happening in his films outside those big effects (and there is a lot).

Goddamnit, I really want to make some shit.

Well said, Ant. I disagree on one thing, though: We may look up to Spielberg, and Spielberg looked up to different things. But we too can go further back and look at the things Spielberg looked at, and learn from both.

Absolutely right DiscoStu. The problem is, a lot of people entering the industry at the moment aren't digging enough into Spielberg and the like to see the influences. They're not learning about the art of filmmaking; they're learning about the process of filmmaking.

(Archie, none of this is related to you!)

Archie is smart and knows this anyway.