The Good, The Bad, The Concussed: Report
A: Myself and the Group
For this project my role was relatively small compared to, say, the role of editor. After helping brainstorm a few ideas in the planning phase I helped direct the actors from place to place across the out door scene, since the set was larger than the others in the short film.
Overall I feel the team was a success. The video turned out well, only with a few gripes here and there, and the filming was able to be finished efficiently in a single day. If I were to give one criticism of any real value to how things worked was it felt like there wasn’t clear enough communication on what exactly we were planning for the overall narrative of the video, causing a bit of confusion on my end in not fully understanding how the story was suppose to work. This problem was fixed by the end of the project however and I have to reason to believe it was the result of anything other than a bit of “First Project Awkwardness” and our team getting used to work together. In other words this problem has, effectively, been solved.
B: The Video
The Good, the Bad, and the Concussed came out very well in my opinion. While we weren’t able to get the video to the desired 3 minute length (final length coming out to about 2:30 with opening and closing credits) the end product was able to get our vision for the little story across regardless. Though even with this shortened length there are instances of padding that, in hindsight, I and the rest of the group feel hurt the final product. The primary example of this being during the climax of the short film when the two characters are having their snowball showdown. There is a large amount of build-up to the first shot only for the tension to be lost with neither shot doing anything. The tension is then needed to be slowly built up again for the real winning shot. This ultimately slows down the scene too much and weakens the pacing and plot of the video. In our attempts to make the video closer to the recommended time we inadvertently made the end product just a bit worse.
The padding problem aside, the rest of the video was quite good. None of the shots last for too long or too little time. Close ups, wide shots, and over the shoulder views are all administered well especially during the climactic showdown. The important information in the scenes are all displayed clearly and center stage with no extenuating details dividing viewer attention. The actors, despite not being drama students by any means, put effort into their performances and did the video justice. The voice over editing in the flashback was implemented well on top of this. And lastly the score, an iconic copyright free “Western Showdown” track fit the tone of the climax well and was edited in perfectly by our team editor. All in all, for our first real project, I feel The Good, the Bad, and the Concussed was a great success.
Comments