I was a student at the Art Institute and I was excited to see that another student from another Art Institute to make a short film that was accepted to Cannes International Film Festival! I was also excited to see it was available to view on Youtube.
Unfortunately, when I first viewed it, I stopped watching after two minutes. I ended it up watching the rest of the film later on because I had to see why it was selected for one of the biggest film festivals in the world.
Please keep in mind I realize I was a student and made a lot of these mistakes. I’m looking at it through the eyes of an international film festival. Here are a few things I noticed in the first two minutes:
1. Jerk-Pan/camera locked on/off. The opening shot is rack focused (which I feel is way abused throughout the entire short) but when it pans left, there is no ease in to it…it’s jerked. The next pan in the next shot is then hand held, then on a tripod. The panning on the tripod on the next shot is very jerky as well.
2. So much empty space. I am always told that everything counts in the frame, but there is so much empty space lingering in some of these shots!
3. Poor sound design. Every sound effects sounds like it is straight from a free sounds website (all hail Videoblocks!) and some of the sounds don’t make sense.
a) Answering machine message doesn’t sound like an answering machine.
b) Throwing a bottle cap into a trash can sounds WAY off.
c) Slamming the full beer bottle outside sounds like an empty beer bottle was slammed in a small room.
4. Vibrating Camera. When they sit down in the living room, their walking causes the camera to bounce around slightly.
5. The flashing clock on the oven is pretty distracting, and I didn’t see any reason (subtext) it would be flashing.
6. The composition on the outside shot was pretty awkward and featured one actor’s head cut off for a part of the scene.
Another interesting thing I noticed is when I first watched this, there was a commenting with some critiques. The comment has since then disappeared.
Again, I understand it is a student film. One can tell by it’s length (11+ minutes) because it didn’t need to be that long. The budget may not have been available to fill the walls with art or something. To my understanding, The Art Institute of Philadelphia is a nice AI in size, so I expected a bit more.
Just hopefully this was just a rough cut 🙂 I don’t know why you’d post a rough cut, though…
But you can judge for yourself!
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