50 hour film project.
 

Two weeks ago I participated in a 50 hour film competition. I was still pumped to do a "scary" movie because of my DVC10 experience. So I was thrilled to be making a real "thriller," and expected a great response from our movie audience.

At the screening there were a lot of humorous, comedic entries. When ours finished screening there was deathly silence. I didn't think this was a good thing.

I spend the past weekend reediting the film, and llike to know what my DVC buddies think of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE5VFIQfG1U

Because of the audio (baby crying over dialogue) issues, I missed what might have been important story cues, and therefore missed the motivation behind the (no spoilers from me)... climax. I like how you intercut it, although I think it could be massaged into a smoother flow between the cuts. Liked the handheld, I think it worked well, although a little bit of attention to lighting (chinese lantern on a boom!) would have helped you greatly in many scenes. There was too much contrast between the scenes that weren't lit and the ones that were, which made the intercutting jerky and pulled me out of the narrative.

To help the pace, I'd cut out as much of the opening scene as I could, it dragged by comparison to the rest.

Overall, I saw the potential there, but missed what had to be critical story because of the lines I missed at the start.

Dylan,

The baby was almost TOO good. I thought I would have to dub in a baby cry to provide motivation for the sister to go out, but the problem is making the lines audible after the baby does her job.

Sounds like I have more editing to do. The lines seem audible on the DvD but the youtube version seems muddier.

Can't do much about the lighting now. We were running out of time, and the lighting setups suffered.

Need to get me a china ball.

Thanks for the comments.

Dick

Dick:

Ran into same sort of serious v. comedy issues in a 48 hour I was involved in in Bay Area. Our film was serious and more traditional, and every thing else campy and/or juvenile type comedy... Its a hard transition for the audience to make when your film is dropped into the middle of several of those films.

I think Dylan is right about tightening up the edit on the front end, reducing the crying baby in favor of mom's emotional reaction to the rejection by her child. I also needed a little more information about the "badness" of the guy showing up at the bar to put a little more of an ominous feeling as things developed...