Visual Look
The camera framing and use of lighting in this film were actually quite impressive. Mr. Gilbert consistently exposed his actors quite well and managed to pull off some rather difficult lighting situations, like a parking light around Eagle’s stadium that is quickly descending into night. \
The editing and postproduction work on the film also looked quite nice. Throughout the film, Mr. Gilbert would bookend segments with quotes from famous people, like Albert Einstein and Yogi Beara. The font was a little too small and tight be easily readable on many screens. A little enlargement and a little wider tracking on the font would take care of this problem easily.
The unfiltered, documentary-style look of the piece worked in most sequences, but there were a few skits that could have stood to have some post production filters put on them. For example, there was a skit that was supposed to be a cable access TV station, but the quality of the camera didn’t lower at all. There are a number of Plug-ins for After Effects that can give you a lower quality analog looking effect on footage, like Tinderbox, for example. Additionally, Nattress has some filters that are specifically designed for Final Cut Pro that can do some of this. Additionally, if that doesn’t make the footage look old enough, enlarging it a bit can help it look a bit less focused and like it was recorded with an older, cheaper camera.
In this same Cable Access Show skit, there were clips from a supposed film from an interviewed filmmaker. These clips currently look pretty much the same as the other shots in the film and I would recommend running them through MagicBullet Editors or Nattress FilmLook to give it a different feel from the rest of the film and make you believe you’re watching clips from a separate work.
One thing that I really liked in the visual look department was the Monty-Python-like stop-motion animation, which was used in the beginning of the film (but was, unfortunately, abandoned shortly thereafter). This was used in an opening section on bus safety skit, with cartoons featuring a skull that ate a bus and then a cartoon man seated on bus a bench in front of a background bed of flames. The stop motion animation worked perfectly with the feel of the piece and the director would be encouraged to consider creating more animations to serve as tie-ins for other pieces of the film.
