Perhaps the best scene by far was where just before the first murder took place. One of the secondary characters was standing in the subway by herself waiting for the train. She kept getting the feeling that she was being watched, but every time she turned around there was no one there. The filmmakers did a great job at editing these shots together, as well as including several moving camera shots that looked to be from the perspective of the stalker. The background music was also very suspenseful, and kept building up until I was sure that the killer was going to leap out and push the girl onto the tracks. But just at the height of the moment, the train comes suddenly rushing into the station with a loud rush of noise…And I literally jumped out of my chair. This film has several of those great white-knuckle moments throughout, which really make it a lot of fun to watch.
Another thing that I found very impressive was when Ebony and Cedric are in a motel room toward the end of the film, I noticed that one end of the room was almost completely covered with square-shaped mirrors. Considering that the room itself was quite small, it’s amazingly impressive that – so far as I could tell, at least – the camera was never seen reflected in those mirrors. Plus, this lent itself to some great high-angle and reflective shots that really paid off in the film’s conclusion.
There were a few minor visual issues, however. In some of the outdoor shots, it looked as though there may have been dust or water on the lens. It’s possible that the sun may just have reflected off of it, but unfortunately this is still a very obvious mistake, which is almost impossible to fix in post. It doesn’t happen very often – mostly toward the beginning of the film – but when it’s still very distracting. It might be a good idea to do a re-shoot or two if at all possible, or to even use some different takes.
There were also some lighting issues with a couple of the outdoor scenes. Though it was extremely daring of these filmmakers to do so many night shoots, there were some in which the lighting looked kind of strange. For instance, in a scene between Ebony and Cedric toward the beginning of the film, they are almost too well-lit, and the moving camera makes the scene look almost like a segment from a reality TV show. Other night scenes, however, looked completely different, almost as though some of the night scenes were actually day-for-night shoots and other ones were the real thing.
[Note to Director – In one indy film I worked on, we had to do a night shoot outdoors in a back parking lot, but the lighting wasn’t near sufficient enough to get proper exposure. So we ended up putting orange gels over all our available lights, and putting them up as high as they would go to create the illusion of artificial street lights. This matched some of the shots, as the actors were already standing under some orange lights. This gave us just enough lighting to avoid looking too bright. But the gels were almost useless by the end of the night, as nearly every bug within a five-mile radius had fused itself to the gels.]
In addition, a couple of the indoor shots had some lighting issues as well. In a scene between Ebony and her friend Candice, for example, Ebony was sitting close to a lamp, which gave her face a bit of an orange glow. But Candice was far enough away from the lamp and her face seemed darker, and had a bluish tint from the light coming in from the window. As a result, the scene looks very mismatched. It may have been a good idea to get a hold of some orange gels and cover the window with them in order to diffuse the blue light and give a more consistent look to the room. This is also a problem that can sometimes be corrected by properly white balancing the camera first.
[Note to Director – Outdoor light tends to have a more blue-ish tint to it, whereas indoor light tends to have an orange tint, and this can often cause problems when shooting indoors near windows. Lighting consistency is very difficult to achieve, which is why it would be a good idea to invest in some orange and blue gels for future use.]
