Visual Look
Like Monty Python, Capitalism – the Movie has lots of strange still images, bizarre animations, sock puppets, stop action Lego characters, and other atypical storytelling devices. While these worked to keep the viewer bemused, for the most part, they felt very rough and lacked the polish I would have liked to have seen. One place where the effects seemed appropriately rough, yet stylishly low-tech, was in creating Peter’s music video for “Money Makes The World Go ‘Round.” The use of strange greenscreen, multiple images, and other vintage ‘80’s tricks is fun and clever, reminding me of a strange combo of Flock of Seagulls and Robert Palmer videos.
While much of the costuming and sets is supposed to be strange, some of it seemed incorrectly strange. For example, when Peter Stock meets with the director of the cancer charity the story revolves around, the man is wearing a red soccer shirt, torn-off shorts, and bare feet. Apparently the charity director has dropped by the home of Stock to discuss Stock helping his charity. It would be strange enough to have a person dressed like a beach bum who’s involved in business discussion in their own home, but it’s doubly strange that he would go to a business associate’s house in such a getup, especially with bare feet. This may have been intended as a form of parody, but it feels incongruous currently.
In keeping with the skit-style feel of the film, most of this film was greenscreened. While half of the greenscreening makes sense, allowing the characters to be placed in locations like Heaven or the River Styxx, the other half do not. This other half involves greenscreening the actors in people’s houses that could easily have been shot in locally. (None of these house backgrounds are mansions or some other cost prohibitive location. Instead, they all appear to be in someone’s flat or apartment.) Even if the greenscreen shots in this film had been well-done, these shots would have been very puzzling because the amount of work to shoot in greenscreen when you could just go and shoot in someone’s flat or home are higher.
Unfortunately, most of the greenscreen shots were not well done. It looked as though the filmmakers didn’t spend as much time setting up their greenscreen as they needed to. As such, many of the most common problems in greenscreen cropped up: backgrounds that would flicker in and out of opacity, actors who would have parts of their bodies eaten away by the keying software, and bits of green that would show through hair and hands. My best guess is that the filmmakers didn’t light the greenscreen at all and, moreover, didn’t light their talent particularly well. This combined with the limited greenscreen ability of Premiere Elements (which the film was edited on) and replacement backgrounds (that were filmed hand-held) came together for extremely tell-tale greenscreen work that felt sloppy. (Good greenscreen is very achievable on a low budget, but it takes work. We chronicle the necessary steps to achieve a good composite in our Greenscreen Issue. Additionally, I am actually co-writing a book on the subject called GreenScreen Made Easy, which will be released from MWP in April 2009.) Of course, the directors may have been intentionally trying to have the greenscreen look rough to go with overall campy feel of the movie. If so, then I would suggest to at least get rid of the greenscreen sections that were shot in people’s homes, as this feels quite jarring.
Use of Audio
The overall audio was pretty easy to understand, although there were a number times that the Rode video mic they used was positioned too far from the actors and they got some room tone (or wind noise) that clashed with other shots that were recorded closer to the actors. Some noise reduction software packages can help minimize the current problems, and, in the future, this can be prevented by positioning shotgun mics no farther than 1 ½ to 2 ½ feet from the talent’s lips. (For outside shots, make sure you have a windscreen on your mic.)
