The biggest thing that would help is if it were made more clear what changed for Silver. She mentions that she wishes that she hadn’t killed herself; more than once, she says she wants one more chance; she acknowledges that what she did was stupid; she admits that she misses her dad, who she couldn’t stand before; and she realizes that she needs other people (as evidenced by the fact that she needs to get everyone in the house together for them to get out). However, there is no definitive cause that indicates the effect (i.e. Silver leaving Purgatory House). It doesn’t have to be something Earth-shattering, but there needs to be something identifiable that changes for Silver in order for the audience to understand why/how she leaves.
Visual Look
This film is quite creative in its use of green and blue screens. They feature prominently in dream sequences, Silver’s classroom (where she must watch life on Earth go on without her on an enormous television screen), and in the scenes immediately after Silver’s death. They look quite good and are surprisingly well done. (I say “surprisingly” only because it can be difficult to make green/blue-screen effects look good on an ultra-low budget film.)
Another simple but very effective use of effects was when Silver was watching her classmates discuss her suicide. Because she’s watching from The Great Beyond (on “EarthTV”), little labels pop up in front of various kids, identifying them as “Molested”, “Anorexic”, “Straight-A student; my parents don’t know I exist”, “I sleep with guys so they’ll like me”, etc, thus showing that her classmates’ problems (as well as her own) are carefully hidden from those around them.
While the overall use of cameras in “EarthTV” is good, there are a few instances (namely in the scene with Silver and Sam’s families) where the camera is showing the exact same thing from the same perspective from a different distance. Not only is it redundant, but it’s confusing, because you get the feeling that it’s supposed to be like a “reality t.v. camera”, except that you’re seeing the same thing on both sides of the screen. Also, the lighting in the scenes with Silver and St. James walking down the halls of Purgatory House is very dim. The footage goes from fairly clear to grainy and back again as the lights flicker in and out. A few times the lights flicker out completely for a few seconds—which makes the viewer think it’s fading to black to another scene—and then they come back on. This happens two or three times, and it becomes rather frustrating. Because everything else in Purgatory House seems to be in good (or at least decent) condition, it’s puzzling why the hallways would have malfunctioning lights.
Additionally, the director experimented with a lot of post-production filters, from the low-saturation of purgatory to the black and white of flashbacks to the color of the real world. However, a little goes a long way with post-production filters and there were a number of times in the film where colors and backgrounds would posterize and fragment in a way that suggested that things like gain, contrast, and intensity in the filter parameters had been pushed a little too far for the footage it was applied to. Lowering the settings on the filters would make them more subtle and decrease the posterization issues. For future movies, better and more thorough lighting of the set gives you footage that is cleaner and therefore can handle a greater number of post-production filters without the footage breaking up.
