Visual Look
The set design for the film is both simple and complex. Simple, because it is all filmed in one location, but complex because of the ingenuity needed to make the most use out of a rather limited space. And even though there is only one crew member, the camera angles are incredibly creative, ranging from up on a rooftop to a hand-held 1st person perspective. When Langen is acting in front of the camera, there is very little camera movement (as there is no one to move the camera!), but the difference is made up by strategic editing and changing perspectives.
Langen made good use of lighting (which is hard to coordinate with a one-person crew!), and had some great special effects. Several sketches ("Sci-Fi Breakfast" and "When God Drinks") rely heavily on greenscreen work, but pull it off well. And even though it's not Lord of the Rings caliber, it works perfectly for the comedic, often corny nature of the film. The director also used Adobe's Premiere Elements to create a cartoon-like character for "Small Bites"; this reminded me of the cartoons on Sesame Street or Square One (anyone remember that show?!). In creatively utilizing all of the visual resources available to him with the location, interesting camera perspectives, greenscreen, and post-production editing, Langen has created a very fun and unique visual style.
Use of Audio
Langen used the onboard camera mic for some of the audio, while other parts (such as the garbled murmurings of the Appliances or the smooth voice of the Narrator) were recorded after the fact. Using the onboard camera mic is almost never a good idea. However, this film is kind of an exception, for a couple of reasons: 1.) There's only one person in the room! It's much easier for one person to be perfectly quiet than two or ten. And 2.) the environment (even outdoors) was very quiet, so there were almost no unwanted noises muddling up the audio. And while the sound from the onboard mic tended to be pretty even, it was still tinny and one-dimensional (as most camera audio is), with hissing and popping during some of the dialogue. The worst example was during the scenes with the talking answering machine. The audio is loud and harsh when it comes out of the machine anyway; but when it's recorded by the camera mic, it gets even worse, because it becomes incredibly "hot" (spiking the sound levels) and even more grating. A very simple solution to this is to simply re-record the dialogue in post, then add a telephone effect to the voice to make it sound as though it's coming out of an answering machine.
Another big problem was the post-production audio. In several places where the dialogue was dubbed, it also got hot and popped and hissed. (An example is "Egg-icide"; at times the grumbling dialogue of the egg was almost impossible to understand because it was so garbled; additionally, the singing was extremely loud and hot.) This is most likely caused by the talent's mouth being too close to the mic and/or a poor quality mic. For the former problem just have the talent sit back farther from the mic (it may require a few test takes to find ideal distance for what you want to record). For the latter issue, Microfilmmaker Magazine has actually reviewed two good-quality USB mic/accessories: Blue's Snowball mic, which runs about $100, and Lightsnake's microphone-to-USB cable for about $70.
