Visual Look
The visual look of this film is gorgeous. Alex Ferrari made sure he sat down with his graphic designers and artists and had this film storyboarded beautifully and completely costume designed. Additionally, he learned what he could accomplish with the DVX100A that he shot the short with so that he could optimize how it dealt with light in order to get the best image possible on location. He then went on to work out with his cinematographer and DP, Angel Barroeta, so that the lighting highlighted the parts of the frame that he wanted to show up most. He also made sure that what effects could be shot with practical effects were done so during shooting, which included use of a guacamole gun (originated by Robert Rodriguez in From Dusk Till Dawn, it allows squib hits to be faked for low budget films), air-soft guns with recoil, and makeup effects.

After shooting was finished, Alex took the footage and edited it. When he completed that process, he sent copies to Sean Falcon and his other effects folks while he put it through Final Cut's color corrector, Magic Bullet Editors, GFilm and one other filter packages to make the video look like film. Because he had taken the time to ensure that costume design, lighting, and shot composition were on target and shot it in 24P, the final color graded footage looks extremely film-like. (Not quite on par with the FilmLook process, but pretty good nonetheless.)

Meanwhile, Sean Falcon took and created muzzle flashes, bullet ricochets, additional blood splatters, and other visual effects for the film in Apple's Shake. (I've shown this film to about 15 people and everyone who's seen it has been blown away that live firearms with blanks were never used in this film.) In the end, the film looks very polished.

This does not mean that the film is without problems. There were some visual issues that popped up.

One issue is with the opening credits sequence. Most of the sequence looks great, utilizing Photoshopped pictures from the decaying hospital the film was shot in and post-production camera shake. However, Mr. Ferrari chose to use some half opacity video overlays in a semi-translucent montage of different shots during this sequence and these ended up looking very much like video. This is primarily noticeable simply because he did such a good job of retaining a film-look for the rest of the film.

The next two issues can be fixed by simply addressing one of them and the other will get taken care of.

The first issue came from the fact that some of the coolest elements of the visual look are lost to the viewing audience due to their speed. Many of the amazing effects (of which there were 100 in this 20 minute film!) pass too quickly to be noticed properly. This is due to the fact that the very cool shoot out sequence that only lasts for a minute or two is shown at full speed. The effects artists have done so much individual work on each shot that you can't see or appreciate these touches at full speed. It's only when you pause the film and go frame by frame that you see a lot of this wonderful work. As such, I think that putting much of the gunfight in slow-mo would be awesome! There's just too much stuff that looks too good to not slow it down a bit and let the human eye soak it in!

This leads us to the second issue, which was a basic monetary issue: the inability to hire stunt people. While many of the stunts that were performed by the actors looked quite nice, the actual death falls tended to be a bit on the wooden side. When I say 'death falls', I mean the act of a person falling over when they've been shot to death. In the short, most of the newly-shot fall backwards stiffly, as though they are redwoods that have just been felled by John Bunyan. This seems very strange and artificial.

So how can these two issues take care of one another? If slow-mo's are used, the strangely wooden motion of the falls don't seem so strange because everything seems strange in slo-mo. Plus, the fact that, in slow-mo, your eye now sees the minute post-work of the blood spatters and other effects more easily means that you're paying more attention to that movement than how realistically the newly-'dead' are falling. (Your eye tends to focus on the most interesting movement in a scene that it can see clearly, just as it tends to focus on the most in-focus element in a scene and/or the brightest element in a scene.)

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