I've been reading the recently-released "How NOT to make a short film." Written by a former Sundance shorts programmer, the book is at its best when it discusses short film cliches. The cliches are the same things I complain about and generally stem from confusing impressiveness with authority (e.g., use of crane shots) and basing one's understanding of the world on film rather than life (e.g., two people sitting in a car talking about nothing). There are also a few cliches I never heard of (opening with a shot of a Japanese tea ceremony).
Reading the book got me thinking about noise film so I watched it again. It's pretty good I think but there are three remaining problems. First, the HDV footage doesn't have much character. It's great at picking up all the important subtleties I shot but it has an overall brittle quality that I don't like. Second, the transition between the microfiche sequence and the red room is weak. I just threw in some codex footage there. It should really be a high-speed deluge of research images. Finally, at the end of the red room sequence needs to be more developed. It needs more of a climax.
The last two problems are not too hard to fix. I've been thinking about solving the first problem. I found a place (link) that does DV -> Super 8 or 16mm conversion so I'm thinking of trying that. It's not going to make the video look film-like, but it might give the footage an interesting character.
1 comment:
Breaking facial hair arc news: at least 2 main characters on Lost, Sayid and Sawyer, are rocking time travel facial hair arcs. The weird part is they are less hairy in the 1970's than present day. That is probably uncommon... This is the right blog for that, right?
-dc
Post a Comment