When Ted wakes up one night, he hears noises outside of his dorm room. Going to his door, he sees a strangely tuxedoed man in sneakers dragging a struggling person down the hall. Realizing that danger lurks in his dorm, he pulls his sneakers on and runs out of his dorm room, just in time to see the tuxedoed man pull out a gun and kill his victim in the hall. Realizing that Ted has seen him, the tuxedoed assailant pursues Ted around the grounds of his university.
During the ensuing pursuit, Ted uncovers the secret of the killing and the mysterious identity of the tuxedoed man’s assailant.
Content
The overall pacing and layout of the story was quite good. As this was a silent film, the pacing, camera angles, and music choices had to tell the story and did so intelligently. The acting was pretty good from the main character, with realistic surprise and fear, for the most part.
The ending was clever and made sense to most watchers due to the fact that it relies on some rather well-established precedents in a variety of TV shows and films. Still, the ending’s twist is more commonly seen in sci-fi films than it is in Noir/Thrillers, so it works pretty well.
Visual Look
The overall look was good considering it was shot with a Handycam at night, which did yield changing levels of low-lux noise as the auto-iris and auto-gain tried to account for the changing light and zoom. Due to the fact that you could tell additional lighting hadn’t been added to the outdoor chase scenes, I was actually surprised at how non-overbearing the noise was. The film was converted to black and white which helped take emphasis away from the color limitations in single chip cameras and served to harken back to the Hitchcock films that inspired this film. (Ironically, films that aim to emulate Hitchcock are the ultimate choice for digital filmmakers who don’t have 35mm lens adapters. Hitchcock hated the depth of field that is the trademark of film, so he would light his scenes so brightly that everything in them was completely in focus. As consumer and prosumer digital video cameras tend to keep virtually everything in focus due to their small chip size, they can come closer to emulating Hitchcock’s style with no additional lighting. Who’d have thought that all the makeup that Hitchcock melted off his actors by using such hot lights could have been saved by just sending a DVX100 or even a Handycam back in time!)
Additionally, while the style was a bit chaotic at times, the overall shooting and editing was actually quite good, which very Hitchcockian XCUs of faces and hands on door handles. While there was a lot of hand held camera work, much of it was fairly stable. Now, with that said, there were some shots that were extremely shaky, such as a shot that follows our hero down a flight of steps from an outside perspective. As this shot did not need to be handheld, a better choice would have been to put the camera on a tripod and tilt the head down to cover the action.
Additionally, as this was his first true attempt at making a serious short film, there were some issues that came up.
The first issue was with cutting from moving to non-moving shots. For example, a moving camera follows Ted as he runs away from his tuxedoed assailant. However, the shots of the pursuer come from an unmoving camera, which immediately look out of place when they are cut to. This is due to the fact that, for all intents and purposes, you can’t cut from a moving camera to a non-moving camera. A good way to not run into this problem for a future film would be to either stop the motion of the camera following the runner before cutting to the non-moving camera or to cut between a moving camera that follows the runner and another moving camera that follows the pursuer.
