For future films, I would suggest an idea that filmmaker Tom Malloy recommends in his book, Bankroll. Use Craig’s list to check for script readers from LA. A lot of these folks professionally read scripts for major studios and are willing to proof Indie scripts for $50-$100. It’s normally a good idea to get three of them, so that the common points between their opinions can be worked on. (And, fortunately for specialized films, many of these folks are fully aware of films that are designed for niche audiences and can help a writer aim toward those audiences.)
Unfortunately, the acting in the first half of the film was also too over the top, so that you felt like you were watching an excessively stereotypical melodrama or a Mexican soap opera. In addition to the acting issues, there were also some casting issues involving age discontinuity. (For example, the actors from the class reunion seemed to be an extremely wide variety of ages. Additionally, a slumber party held by seventeen year old Tiffani seems to be populated by as many 11- to13-year-olds as girls who would likely be in Tiffani’s class.)
In my first film, I cast a lot of my friends, because I didn’t think that I needed to have an official casting call. This lead to a lot of acting issues which could have been avoided by just doing an official casting call at the different colleges and institutions in my area. While I don’t know what casting process was used in this film, my guess is that it could have benefited from a more thorough and external casting call. (This is especially true since the film was set in Nashville, which has a huge acting population.)
By the last half of the film, the acting had come together more believably, plus they added some new actors who were more believable. From a content perspective, the material revolved much more around a call to Christ, which makes sense for the demographic the film is intended for and seemed to be a subject the writer was much more comfortable with.
The cameras for this film were the Panasonic HVX200 and HPX-500, which are both good cameras. The majority of the footage looks really quite nice and polished, with well crafted lighting in most scenes.
With that said, while the overall look of the film stayed pretty consistently high level, there were some problematic visual issues.
The first issue came from the 180-degree-rule in the intro dream sequence. Essentially, the 180-degree-rule refers to a line of continuity that you shoot on and cut on so that you don’t confuse the audience. If you do it correctly, the audience has a good idea of where everyone in a given scene is in relationship to one another. If you do it incorrectly, the audience is confused as to where anyone is. This rule was broken a lot during the opening of the film, where a group of people are seen talking to one another during the reunion dream. (The best training set I’ve seen for truly explaining how to shoot and edit a crowd scene without confusing the audience is the Hollywood Camerawork set. It goes in-depth about how to shoot and edit multiple people in a group setting effectively.) While the following of the 180-degree-rule gets better throughout the film, the fact that they opened with something so disconcerting immediately makes things even more difficult for the audience to buy into.
The second issue comes with the use of dissolves. In narrative filmmaking, dissolves are used to show the passage of time. If you use them to cut between things in the midst of a continuous sequence, it jolts the audience and makes them feel as though you’ve made a mistake, much as a jump cut does. Currently, there are a number of dissolving transitions that are not meant to show time passage.
Finally, there is a montage sequence at the end of the film that’s designed to show what the family has learned through the course of the film. They do this by getting rid of their debt-inducing credit cards. Unfortunately, the filmmakers try to literally tie in every visual with a song from the Dave Ramsey show that they’re using, but it quickly becomes hard to swallow. Especially since most of the destruction showcases means that they wouldn’t have regular access to on their new low budget, such as new shotguns to shoot up cards or a professional pyrotechnician to blow up their credit cards with dynamite. (Additionally, the greenscreen composite of the TNT going off doesn’t look believable and should be removed due to this fact.) It would be best to just show a few clips of them destroying their credit cards in more believable manners and use a smaller clip of the song.