Showreel 2008
 

Hey guys. Taking the plunge and showing my work to you lot. :)

Hope you like.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=XXsfoaGPdyQ

Overall, good reel! You have a great variety of work, something that I could stand to work on. Your locations are beautiful, and your shots (even the advertisements) avoid "cheesy" and are very artistic.

You show twenty or thirty shots of some of the scenes, and some of the really, really good shots get one or two seconds, when they should get eight or ten. When you get a "woah... good shot!" shot... let it breathe. These are the shots that get you jobs. Use more of them, and less filler.

Cutting to the beat is effective at times, but can be overdone. You tow that line. It doesn't bother me, but it's close. When done once in a while, it makes a certain impact. When done every beat, it makes me feel like I'm at a disco.

Your photography is good, you have good compositional skills. I appreciate your efforts to get a variety of color in every frame, though I can't tell if it's intentional or not. (That's a compliment!)

Your iris seems to be open very wide -- even in tight shots you have a long depth of field. Try more Neutral Density over the lens.

The shots -- especially the really beautiful ones... need color correcting. I'm a videographer, and I used to take that as an insult. Then I sat in on a Larry Jordan seminar on color correcting, now I color correct every shot. Bring your blacks down. Some of your highlights are over exposed. All things easily corrected in post, that will make your stuff look HOT. Turn up the saturation on that beauty stuff. You've got some gems there... make them sing!

Overall, good job. I'd hire you.

Matt,

Congratulations on your trailer. It looks like you did a lot of shooting, because there were a lot of really great shots in it! There is much to be proud of in your work.

What Oliver said was harsh, but in most cases, true. I could follow the story without reading the caption, but it could certainly be made easier to follow. Specifically, I felt like the trailer didn't end, it just stopped. I wanted to check to see if the tape broke.

A good trailer will, in it's final moments, leave you hungry for more. Mysteries will leave you with a "whodunnit?" question, comedy will leave you with a big laugh, drama will leave you with a tear. Your trailer left me wondering if my cable modem came unplugged.

I was surprised at how good some of the shooting was, and how bad some of the shooting was. Did the same person shoot the whole film? There were steadicam (?) shots in there that looked like they were done by a master. (Incidentally -- how'd you do them?) But the interviews were (for the most part) mediocre.

The opening shot of the movie was done over cloudcover. This shot begs to be shot at golden hour, or even in the afternoon with a ton of shadows! This shot is decidedly mediocre, and could/should/would be the best shot of the whole trailer! The opening shot is the one where I decide whether I'm going to watch the rest of the trailer, or run to the bathroom before the film starts. Hook me!

Thanks for the criticism. I agree with about everything said so far. One of my biggest problems is that the more I work on something, the less I can see it from a first time perspective. So what seems obvious to me, makes no sense to others. I will think a few days on how to remedy that. The doc is about twenty minutes long and I only wish I could post the whole thing to see if 'it' suffers from the same thing as the trailer in that regard.

Just an aside. The dam has been built but the river is filling in with silt way upstream from where anyone thought it would and now a sixty mile stretch will be unrunnable and there will be no way anyone can down it. Eden lost.

Everything was shot by me. Thanks for the steadicam compliment. I practiced for hours and hours with the merlin and the hv20 and a wide angle. Thank you Charles Papert for cookbook settings and other hints.

I agree with first shot looks terrible but should look the best. I plain and simply missed the best time of day to shoot but didn't want to take it out. I thought it needed some tripod help too. A little jerky.

As for lighting interviews, I'm absolutely horrible. If you see the other film on Vimeo of mine (I hope to have that one critiqued in a week or so) the lighting is even worse. I about blind the viewer. As soon as I get a little better I think I will try and post some stills on photon management and try to save myself.

Thanks again and feel free to keep firing.

Heinz Top This Challenge entry
 

Here's my latest Heinz commercial for the YouTube contest of the same name.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJR_9bZNExs

Or for higher quality, watch it on Stage6

http://www.stage6.com/user/soultaker...tdogs-heavenly

Jazz Band Video
 

Here is one of my recent projects for you. Please critique. Thanks.

http://gallery.mac.com/royermedia#100056

My new film: "WHY NO ARMS?"
 

Greetings folks! I've posted some of my films here in the past (such as "Superheroes").

Well I've completed my latest short comedy "Why No Arms?" The first for 2008, shot over 3 days with no script, natural lighting. Haha. Original music by Van Kapeghian. It'd be awesome if you gave it a watch. For more info and a download link (plus YouTube link), click here: http://www.amfproductions.com

It was a fast paced film, the music was good, some good action shots, not sure about the whole premise... Keep on working!!

If that was the look you were going for then you nailed it.

But, what were you going for? No story, no musicians, no scenics, just swirls like you filmed it off the screen in itunes. Not trying to be critical here but there's really nothing to critique.

In order to tell where you are going wrong you need to tell us what you were trying to do,

As Jim said if you were going for the windows media player visualizations
look then you got it.

Andy.

"Captain Rork and the Professor's Map"- Five minute adventure
 

Here's a short film I did for a student run film festival at Carleton College http://dvdfest.org/ . Rules of the festival required that the movie be no longer than five minutes and use iMovie for final output. thirty seconds of footage generated in outside programs was allowed. We decided to use these thirty seconds to the greatest extent that we could, and wound up winning first place.

You can see it on my website:
http://www.blarbus.com/

What do you think?

I thought it was very good. There was a shot towards the beginning where the mic was in the frame, but only for a second. But the one thing I didn't like at all was the music choice, it just didn't go well with the movie at all. Other than that it was a really good short film. Good Job.

Hi Jim and Andy. Thanks for taking the time to look at it. I guess I'm not sure what I was going for. I wanted to create something that was visualy pleasing and would fit the music that I made. And I did plagiarize by using windows media. I used my camera to record the visuals from media since I had no means to create my own at the time and mix them with some other video that I took. I added some additional lighting affects with Vegas. I've shown this to friends and recieved a "ho hum" yes that's nice response. Thanks for giving it to me strait guys.

Oliver

Hey everyone... we put together a behind the scenes / "making of..." for this spec commercial for your viewing. We go over some shooting and how we accomplished the Visual FX in this spec. Check out the video!

http://tripleeproductions.wordpress....ec-commercial/

Enjoy! Feel free to post comments.

Thanks!

Just to try to pick up some extra video work. Glad you liked it. Thanks