"Trapped" My movie production final. Critique please!

Im confused about the entire story. Nice panning in your shots though, but im not really digging the lens flare at all.

yea the camera didnt have a lens hood yet.

well the scenario thing was we had to film someone being 'trapped' in an way we wanted. i chose to have my subject trapped in a bad dream, the world freezes, and someones stealing his xbox haha. as for the shovel, very random yes but thats how dreams work!

Oh ok i didnt see the xbox.

oh well now knowing what it is It makes sense. but if I didnt know how would going back and pausing help me?

because you might be able to see that the black thing with white is a person holding an xbox

you should have more people that were frozen, not bad tho

yeah i know it was just a lot of work given the time I had. It was really fun working in after effects though.

well filmed, well edited, poor story

clean your lense off real good before you film into the sun.  Other  than that i liked it. didnt understand it till you told me what was going on though.  Just something else to work on

Coppin my song choice?? Ha just kidding, i liked it nice work with the frozen scenes. But like others have said, should have refilmed all of the shots with the dirty lens and flare, kinda ruined the rest of the good quality shots.

I actually totally did haha. I just couldn't find anything else to fit with it haha. ya that lens flare got some guff from my teacher.

I read your explanation before i watched it, so it actually made sense to me, but had i not had an explanation i probably wouldn't of really understood it. Either way though, the story was a little weak, but everyone else has already said that and like you said you didn't really have a ton of time to develop it.

I agree obviously with everyone else regarding the whole lens flare/dirty lens issue. Lens flare can add a nice touch in the right shots, but like stated, make sure the lens is perfectly clean or you really do have to reshoot it.

I can't quite figure out exactly what it is that bothers me about some of the shots, but no body else has pointed it out. Maybe you're not shooting fully manual? Or maybe you're just not on manual focus in some shots, but the shots in the beginning where you often have the subject right in the middle of the frame, then leave it to expose a dark background bother me. I know in one of the shots the background immediately lightens up, which leads me to believe you were shooting that on auto, but that's something i immediately noticed and distracted me from the story. There was also another shot shortly after that with hands? or something, i forget exactly. But same sort of deal, but this time the background didn't lighten up, but because the hands were close to the lens, the background had been out of focus. Once the hands were taken out of the shots, the camera immediately racked focus to the background. It's little things like that that you don't always think of when shooting but break up the continuity when editing. That creates a pretty messy transition to the next shot.

I did enjoy the short though, the filming and editing was definitely really good. I really liked the frozen stuff, you did that really well and it definitely has a 'wow' factor to it. I was just being really picky with that last bit but i figured I might as well let you know so you can correct it in the future.

screen direction

Ummm... Yeah

never be afraid to tell your talent to change their shirt. That thing was horrendous. 99% of the time you'll want logo/word-less clothing.

That aside, pacing was pretty good. Mostly interesting-looking shots. Not bad. I also noticed that a few shots looked like they were set to auto-exposure, but I'm not sure what's going on there exactly.

As to the issue of whether people "get it" or not-screw that man. If you make something exactly how you want it, and a lot of people still dont get it, dont worry.

One last suggestion, since it's a dream, i would've done more to establish it as surreal. The frozen stuff was pretty good, but walking through the woods you had potential to do more.

What'd you shoot with?

thanks for the response. and to the person above thanks aswell. ya I wasn't using manual settings the whole time so I guess thats definately something to remember for next time. I was using a canon HV20. Ya i guess the woods did have alot of potential maybe like seeing some random things you dont typically see in the woods, I just couldnt do the freeze frames in there because with the wind blowing the trees around I dont think that would come out clean. actually, I guess as long as the mask doesnt have any tree in it, I woulda been fine. and for sure il remember the clothing next time.

thanks!

I think everything I'd tell you has already been said, so I'll just be brief.

Although I did eventually get the storyline, the actual storytelling aspect of it wasn't very good. There were no real big hints about the dream sequence-ness of it, for me at least, until things started freezing in place.


The filming, minus the above mentioned things about exposure/focus, was good. You've got a good start on the technicals of making video footage. Make more, and do some good storyboard-ing before you do.





And just things that grabbed me personally: a) the t-shirt was probably a bad choice for the video, but it's Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad, the local Rochester reggae rockstars, so I was stoked on that cause I've seen them live twice and they rock, and b) you used Heartbreaker for the longboard segment, I absolutely LOVE that song.