Visual
Look
Surprisingly, the visual look of the film was quite good,
for the most part. I say surprisingly because the film was
shot entirely with a Canon Z45 consumer camcorder, when
the XL1 the director was planning on using fell through.
While there are some obviously consumer traits like auto-focus
blurs and auto-gamma adjust, at times, much of the film
actually looks pretty professional. What allowed it to look
more like a professional product, rather than the consumer
product it could have (or perhaps “should” have)
was the fact that the director was able to borrow 3 Arri
lights, which permitted him to light most of the scenes
properly. (And he knew how to use them in conjunction with
natural lighting sources to get a professional lighting
arrangement, which is even more important.) You can have
the best camera on the market, and if a scene isn’t
lit properly, it’ll look cheap and unprofessional.
Meanwhile, as Mr. Norton showed, you can have a very basic
camcorder and have it look pretty professional by lighting
it properly. One of the especially nice uses of lighting
in the film involved lighting through windows, which caused
shadows of the latticework and sub-window frames to be cast
into the scene, and some nice, soft mood lighting at Cal’s
apartment.
The
camera angles were pretty professional and the hand-held
shots didn’t shake too much for most of the movie.
The only recurring shots that didn’t work too well
involved first person perspectives of attacks, like a scissors-stabbing
toward the end of the movie and a spanking a little while
after that. While these are cool ideas, they have spatial
problems. In the stabbing example, the scissors’ blades
doesn’t go past the camera lens, so it looks very
fake. (This wasn’t helped by the fact that they sprayed
a glass in front of the camera lens with “blood”
in conjunction with the stabbing. While the idea was good,
the reason it didn’t help was because it looked less
like blood than it does red-tinted water, which doesn’t
work even in a campy film.) This one just needs to be cut,
in my opinion. The spanking suffers from a similar problem,
but can be saved if a “shake” effect is applied
to the image whenever the paddle supposedly hits the camera,
as the extra camera motion will sell the shot. (Oddly enough,
while first person perspective shots were an issue throughout
the film, most of the first person perspective shots in
the final battle between Isabel and The Sorority
actually worked pretty well.)
Some
of the special effects (effects done in production) were
a little over the top, in regards to the gore, but few were
too over the top for a horror film—especially a campy
horror film. Additionally, many looked pretty good even
when taken out of the campy, horror genre comparison, like
a scene where an eyeball is stabbed with a pencil and pulled
out. The visual effects (effects done in post production)
went from just barely campy to so campy that they probably
went too far, even for a campy horror film. Lots of glow
effects were used to show magical power around objects,
as well as to show telekinetic powers being used by members
of The Sorority, which worked quite well for this
type of film. The parts that just got too campy to work
well were at the end, in the final fight between Isabel
and The Sorority, when they try to pull out the heavy
duty magic powers. [Note to the Director: Even
if a film is supposed to be campy, a few visual effects
go a long way. Scale back the effects to a more reasonable
level and the film will work more effectively.]
Finally,
one thing that I would like to see is this film be matted
into a 1.85:1 letterbox format, as this will make the film
look more professional. Even if the film is being distributed
to video and is designed to be campy, letterboxing still
adds a professionalism that would be good.
Use
of Audio
The overall understandability of lines in this film is pretty
good, but right now it’s partially redubbed and partially
production audio. While definitely not perfect, the film’s
ADR is some of the most effective and well-done of any film
we’ve received to date. Unfortunately, it’s
so much better and cleaner than most the production audio
in the film, that the two don’t mix very well. As
a good chunk of the film is already redubbed, I would recommend
redubbing most of it to get a consistent sound. (There are
a few scenes, largely in closed off areas like Cal’s
appartment that are small enough that the production sound
is good enough to stay in, but most of the rest of the production
audio scenes have a lot of background—or “wild”—sound
and a lot of reverb that make them unusable.)
There
are a few additional recommendations I would make when it
comes to the dubbing.
First,
while sync is nearly dead on Isabel (partially because she
speaks in a close-mouthed way that makes dubbing much more
forgiving), some of the other characters are noticeably
off and need to be either re-recorded or fine-synced. Cal
is probably the most noticeable of the ones with issues,
because of how wide he would open his mouth to speak and
how many sounds were clearly coming out of his mouth when
he wasn’t speaking. Folks like this are difficult
to dub unless you dub all the little vocal sounds they are
making with their mouths, even when they’re not speaking
or when their lines trail off into a chuckle.
