Please help me avoid the same mistakes!
 

Included in this post is a link to a short piece I was involved in making. I would really appreciate it if anyone with a little free time on their hands could take a look at it and help identify some of the problems.

As a little background, I made this film as part of Scary Cow a small independent film co-op located in the San Francisco bay area. We are all amateurs and volunteers, so please keep that in mind. We were one of the teams fortunate enough to be awarded with a budget prize.

This film was shot with a Canon XH-A1 in 24f, a bogel 509 head and manfrotto tripod. For sound we used one of the Sennheiser shotgun mics (it was a rental, so I don't remember the exact model, but it was surely one of the lower end) on a boom with a softie windscreen. It was edited using Sony Vegas 8.

Obviously since we were one of the winners I've heard some positive feedback, so rest assured this isn't a pump the ego post. I would really appreciate it if you would eviscerate me, but please do so in a helpful manner.

I know there are a lot of mistakes, most of them probably mine, and certainly there are even more which I never noticed. So please feel free to point anything out, but also please suggest a solution or alternative approach that might yield better results.

Here is the where you can find the video. It is ten minutes in length. Obviously, there has been some loss of quality in getting it on google video. I was not responsible for the transition, but I doubt I could have done a better job.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...cow&pr=goog-sl

A charming video that got across the gawkiness and fumblings made by some of us during the process of early relationship awareness. Did you also mean to convey this as part of the videoing/lighting/editing process too? If so, my comments below are of absolutely no relevance at all - so don't read on.

1] Zebras. The over exposed areas/sections were hard to deal with. Better you should mask areas, bounce light and definitely kill areas that are leapingly harsh. Up to you.

2] Sequencing of edits. You have a few painfully non-sequenced cuts.

3] Not all, but there are some transitions that are not confident and, basically, without reason.

4] Lighting on the stairwell is good. This could have served very well as your overall lighting standard.

5] The section at 7:15 has some really neat lighting. So you can do it.

6] Jump cut at 7:50

My advice? Show it to an anally retentive Dickensian Englishman like I.

Grazie