Overall, the visuals are beautiful. The lighting is strong and stylistic, visible evidence of the time and money expended on quality light kits for the shoot. DP Angel Baroetta (well known for shooting Alex Ferrari’s Broken) did a lovely job of setting up his shots in an effective and professional way. They used a P+S Technik Mini35 35mm lens adapter in conjunction with a Panasonic HVX200 to get truly film-like visuals for this film, focusing especially on a very shallow depth of field in most shots. Now, while I love the shallow depth of field that can be achieved with a 35mm lens adapter, I felt like they walked the line at having the depth of field being too shallow. It’s an opinion call, but I did feel like the shots would have been improved a bit by having a little deeper depth of field, especially at times where we see a side-by-side profile of Jordan and Malcolm with her in focus and him slightly out of focus.
In addition to some of these slight focal issues, there was another issue in the editing department for the first third of the film. A lot of the shots were strangely cut together, so that the viewer didn’t really feel as though they were connecting with either character. (Which magnified the introductory content issues we mentioned before.) One of the common themes was to cut from a close up of her talking and babbling, to a close up of the back of the paper he’s reading. This was clearly intentionally done to show the disconnect that they had to overcome, but it was viscerally very off-putting. I don’t think the idea was bad, I think it was just done too often in the first 5-7 minutes of the film, when it’s more important to get a stronger connection with the main characters in a film.
The actual dialogue in Terminal is a bit problematic because it varies so much in its volume. Sometimes it’s a perfect volume and then, in mid-ramble, Jordan’s voice will drop until you can barely hear parts of her sentences. The simple way to correct this is to mix the dialogue as close to –12 Db as possible, with the music bed being mixed at approximately –18 Db. (Adobe’s newer CS4 products will auto-mix levels to a certain decibel level. While it’s not perfect, it does a decent job of getting you in the ballpark so you can custom tweak the results yourself.)
The music and sound effects in this film were pretty polished. While the score at times felt a bit too much like it was looped in Acid, it was unobtrusive in the least poignant parts and swelled to an appropriately dramatic level when there were times of true emotion being shown by the protagonists.
