Visual Look
There was one really attractive shot, midway through the film, when demonic succubae try to seduce Darius and he gives into their wiles. To make the sequence provocative, without showing anything untoward, we see a camera shot of the Succubus’ hands roaming up and down Darius’s torso. Then, to give us the visual allusion that they are involved in sexual intercourse, we see shadows cast on the ground of them making love. This is a nice touch that worked well.
Unfortunately, the visual look of the rest of the film was highly mismatched. Gorgeous stock footage shots of sunrises, aerial shots of landscapes and outer space were intercut with lackluster, shaky shots of the sky, with high lux, low contrast night shots acquired by the GL-1. The overall look of the film was such that it looked like it had been acquired with an old $300, single chip camcorder, rather than on a $2500 3 CCD Canon. This is most likely because the film’s environments were severely underlit and the camera’s autogain had to compensate, which immediately degraded the image from a sharp, semi-professional looking one to a very grainy, consumer looking one. The way to solve this problem in the future is take the time to properly light your set to give enough light to the 3 ¼” sensors in the GL-1. On lower budget films, you may not be able to afford an Arri light kit like the one we reviewed in this issue, but you can definitely afford some scoops and 500W 3200K Photoflood bulbs, like the one we describe in our article on Lighting with "No" Budget. Additionally, a good preview monitor is a good thing to use, so that you can verify that you are getting good lighting, whether it is an actual standalone monitor or a hookup to a laptop.
While the succubae seduction
scene looked nice...
...Most of the other shots were
badly under-exposed and grainy
.
In addition to the editing issues mentioned in the content section, there were also editing issues in the Visual Look section, as there were a number of jump cuts and false cuts. Jump cuts are cuts made from the same angle and the same distance, rather than cutting to a different angle at a different distance. This causes you to do a double take and takes you out of the film. These seemed to be to cover mis-steps in dialogue, but they often included a different version of the same line, so it didn’t cover anything up. For future reference, you want to make sure that you separate cuts by 30 degrees in angle and, usually, at least one change of distance. (This is not the case with reverse close ups, which are the same distance from either party, but it is the case with different angles of a single scene). For more information about how to shoot and cut things together cleanly, I highly recommend the Hollywood Camerawork cinematography DVD course from Per Holmes. It is an excellent way to learn the craft of camerawork and, as a reader of this magazine, you get it for 30% off in our Discount Section.
Use of Audio
The entire film was either redubbed with the tinny onboard mic and then not synched properly, or the audio for much of the film was shifted off-sync in the editing process. I would guess that it was a combination of both problems, which led to bad sync and tinny, amateurish sound to the audio quality. (I would suggest reading our Audio Tips That Every Microfilmmaker Needs article for preventing this in future films). To take care of the issues here, the film needs to be cleanly redubbed, with a standalone shotgun mic plugged into a computer system. (For more on how to set a homemade dubbing studio, see our how-to article here).
The music by Vangelis is very pretty, but it often cuts in abruptly with no buildup, as though a section was simply pasted randomly into the piece. Additionally, I see no information in the credits that makes me believe that the director got permission to use this music, despite the fact that they state that it is copyrighted by Vangelis in the credits. As such, this film would not be able to be entered into most film festivals. To get music that could be used in place of this and would dovetail into and out of suspenseful segments, the director could look at our Score Composers section to find a score composer or use a score composing software like MusicBed DV or SonicFire Pro.
