5/6/09

Blanche Julien Briestroff, Medora Choi, Jing Ting Poon, Hannah Short

It was extremely boring writing 600-word film reviews on Monday. Hence the "thumbnail" review:

Direction:
- The beginning was very effective as it had a rich combination of tragic music, rhythmic editing and clean narration.
- The concept of a person chasing an ideal was intriguing, but then it could be further fleshed out ALTHOUGH it was still intriguing because it got me thinking after watching the film. Hence the near-lack of participation during the feedback session. I did comment on the music though.
- Nice portals (Although a lot of them weren't portals...but still. I liked the cut from the clipboard to the food tray.)
- Albeit an effective beginning, the bulk of the movie was hampered by a slow-paced chase which dragged.

Editing:
- Again, the beginning was edited nicely.
- Although shots were sped up, the pace was still quite slow. In my opinion, it would be quite difficult to change the pace of the film during post-production when the editor only has limited footage shot by the cinematographer to work with. "Limited" as in the every scene is shot with only one camera. If you think about films like the Bourne trilogy, the crew doesn't actually storyboard chase scenes (I think they only storyboard the important bits, such as a shot of a car crashing against another); they place a lot of cameras in different places so they can capture the whole chase scene from a lot of different angles: it would be easier for the editor to string the clips together this way because he/she would have a lot to work with to ensure a fast pace. So editing can improve the pacing of a film to a certain extent, but I think it's mainly about the way the film is shot by the cinematographer.
- Anyway, the editing was solid. I didn't like the last shot though (zooming into Julien's eye). Omitting it would make the ending better. But then again, it's really up to whether the editor and the rest of the group members liked it or not. Guess they liked it (except Julien, who, uh, was the director).

Cinematography:
- People may disagree with me, but I thought the cinematography was quite formulaic. I could see a pattern throughout the film: smooth, fluid shot CUT TO tracking shot and so on. It wasn't a big problem but I think it contributed (in a bad way) to the pacing of the film (made it slower).
- The experimentation with shots was there, but it wasn't bold enough. I saw dutch-angled tracking shots and manually focused shots (which didn't work out very well...in one shot, it could be seen that the camera focused on the dust on the lens! In another, the intention was to get Julien's hand in focus and the background unfocused, but unfortunately everything was out of focus!).

Sound:
- I liked the music a lot.
- Yes, a lot.
- The narration was clean. Appropriately clean, enough bass to make it sound narration-like, although I could hear the slightist hiss of white noise. But still, good job.
- The attempt to fill most of the film with music was noticed. There was one point during the film where the transition from the song to the loop taken from the song was noticeable. By noticeable I mean flawed and clumsy. I later on found out that an extra loop was accidentally added in that bit, so all is forgiven.
- The second transition from loop A to loop B was so smooth that it was unnoticeable. Good job guys - good use of cross fade.

Oops..I pretty much ended up writing another 600-word review. So much for writing "thumbnail" reviews...