Later, we realize that something is not right about Mr. Townsend when his lantern spits up fiery dust after he sets it down. This effect works quite well, as does a consolidation of red light around Mr. Townsend and a red gleam in his eye. The fiery dust that the lantern spits up becomes smoke that hangs in the air. Unfortunately, the problem with this digital smoke is that it moves too slowly for normal smoke and covers every shot entirely, which smoke doesn’t really do. Speeding up the decay and movement of the smoke will help it feel more realistic, and using a feathered garbage matte at the top 1/3 of the screen can make the smoke appear to dissipate toward the ceiling. Obviously, this is made simpler with a camera that is mounted, whereas the hand-held movement of these shots does make this fix a bit more difficult. (For users of After Effects, AE actually has a fairly sophisticated tracking element which can help you match movement on hand held shots.)
At another place, Mr. Townsend offers three attractive women to one young man, and a brief flash of lightning lets you see that they are actually necrotic zombies. This effect works quite well. However, an effect where Mr. Townsend morphs into Vernon’s father doesn’t work so well. This scene is designed as more of a flashback in which Vernon remembers something his father told him. As such, rather than having Mr. Townsend morph into him, a semi translucent image of his father reminding him could appear in the smoke in front of Mr. Townsend. With a feathered garbage matte around the other footage, it would look almost holographic. [Note to the Director: And, if you added a glow around the edge of the garbage matte, you could actually make the memory of the father look like the ghost--Jedi in Star Wars IV-VI!]
Overall more of the effects work than don’t in this film, but the touchups on the ones that work less well would help the entire film.
Use of Audio
This, unfortunately, is where this film takes its biggest hit. While Mr. Williams had acquired a very decent 3 CCD camcorder in the VX-1000, he did not wait until he acquired a shotgun mic for it. As such, all of the audio was recorded with the onboard mic, which was, quite honestly, pretty awful. While you could make out 80% of what was said, the remaining 20% was very difficult, due to background noise, camera noise, and a variety of other issues. This was made more problematic because the audio levels weren’t mixed very well, which meant that loud voices would spike the volume and nearly deafen you. (Additionally, later in the film, the audio begins slipping off sync. This could have been due to a faulty DVD burn or it could be because it is easy to accidentally slide your audio. This just needs to be slid back on sync if it’s the latter.)
Currently, for this film to be the best it can be, it really needs to be redubbed. While this is irritating, it’s actually not as complicated as many folks are afraid of. We have a general article on ADR that I myself have written and, as the director used Sony Vegas, we also have a specific article on using Vegas for ADR purposes. Reading both articles will help give you an idea of how to proceed.
There were a couple uses of special sound effects in the movie, mostly to correspond with special effects, like Mr. Townsend’s lamp shooting out a stream of light and dust. There was one effect that was used in association with a physical effect in which a young man’s neck was snapped. Unfortunately, this didn’t work because the background noise cut out. The filmmaker accelerated the clip that accompanied the sound effect, which is probably why he had cut out the background noise. For these situations, a clip of background noise should be used to prevent things like this from being noticeable.
The music that was composed for the film was actually quite good and helped pull me into the storyline, despite all the audio problems. As I’m very sensitive to audio problems, this speaks highly for how well the music was composed.
