Visual Look
Shot on two DVX100A cameras, the overall camerawork is quite good. The lighting is also pretty good, although the use of colored lighting in certain scenes is a bit overwhelming, noticeably in a club early in the film and in a shootout that occurs toward the end. Currently the lighting uses just gel-covered lights (most notably dark red), which causes the characters to be washed in that color, rather than being accented by the color. The best way to think of lighting in this context would be like makeup. Foundation makeup is applied before blush and lipstick. Lighting works similarly. Base lighting should illuminate the action and the scene, then colored lighting can accent that without becoming overbearing.
The director mentioned that he had been excited to shoot his first digital feature as it permitted him to try out a number of post-production effects that he couldn’t afford on his previous film, a 16mm feature. I certainly understand that, as there were a lot of post effects in this film. Not quite as many as in Tony Scott’s Domino, but a pretty large number. Some of these were actual optical effects, like smoke from a bong, bullet wounds in people being shot, and haze off the heat-soaked concrete roads of California and Nevada, while others were color grading choices, like choosing to blow out whites in daylight scenes.
Some of these effects worked really well. For example, the bullet wounds and muzzle flashes in a shootout at the end of the film worked out quite nicely. Additionally, a scene where Max is burning a car that uses digital fire looks believable.
With that said, on the other hand, many of effects didn’t work all that well because Mr. Myers is still getting the feel for how little is actually needed to accomplish certain effects. For example, a heat haze effect applied over highways and outdoor driving scenes was used so heavily in nearly every road scene that much of the picture was contorted. While real heat waves cause contortions, there is an organic nature to them which was not present in this film. As it is difficult to get organic-looking heat waves in post, I normally recommend that if you can’t get them naturally then you should not use them. Even Hollywood films only use heat waves on certain shots, as a visual hint of how hot it is, rather than on all exterior shots. If it’s still desirable to create heat waves in post in a special effects program like Particular, ParticleIllusion or EffectsLab, I recommend reducing the number of seeds (or particle generators) the effects program generates and making the seeds larger in radius, with slower ripples. Additionally, the seeds should slowly move back and forth horizontally, with each seed moving at a slightly different rate than those around it.
As to the color grading, the choice to blow out the whites in outdoor and sunlit shots to give the film a more stylistic look actually resulted in degrading the footage and making it more digital looking. As this is a post effect that can be corrected without reshooting, I would encourage lessening the extremes of color grading to remove this problem. This is a constant concern with all digital video footage due to the fact that digital has far less latitude than film for pushing levels before the picture breaks down.
While most of the effects issues were due to extremes, there were a couple that didn’t work at all.
The first is a sequence where Michele and Max are in a car and an artificial lens flare has been positioned over the windshield. This looks unbelievable and really needs to be either removed or seriously subdued to be acceptable.
The second one came in a scene in which Michelle and Max have had a fight and she drives off in her car into the Reno night. A POV from her perspective in the car works. However, then they tried to create a profile shot of her driving by compositing different layers of video footage of her and reflections of Reno over footage of the car. These layers don’t begin to match the car’s motion and immediately jerk the viewer out of the believability of the film. Because this is so distracting, this scene just needs to be cut completely. In all truth, as Max is the main character and the perspective of this tale, we don’t need to ride along with Michelle anyway.
