Another issue that was a mixed bag for this film was choreography. There were some areas, like the climactic fight between Tony’s friends and Bigsquatch near the end, that really looked good. In another sequence, Bandit fights a hillbilly in his muffler shop, which was really clever and looked pretty good most of the time, but had some close ups of the hillbilly punching him in the face that looked extremely fake because the actor was clearly pulling his punches awkwardly. (One clever trick for showing closeup head strikes when dealing with a non-professional stuntman is to actually shoot a punch backwards. Essentially, have the victim put his head backwards and have the assailant stick his fist straight out. Then the victim head butts the fist and the assailant pulls his fist back as fast as he can to the side of his body. It takes a little playing around, but eventually you can get a really authentic looking punch to the head when you play the footage backwards and add good sound effects and perhaps a little blood videopainted in Photoshop.) Still, some other scenes, like the early wrestling scenes, really looked bad. While I’m sure the early scenes are supposed to look faked, they looked so faked as to be unauthentic to the type of audience backyard wrestling has. (In fact, that’s one of the things that attracts folks to backyard wrestling is the fact that people are far more likely to actually get hurt because they don’t have the training to be gentle.)
The overall growth arc of Tony, the main character, made sense and I could believe his journey. As such, the ending of the film worked. While it wasn’t the most original ending in the world, it definitely fit the feel of the film and left the viewer satisfied.
Shot with the tried and true Panasonic DVX100A, the look of Cannonball was extremely solid. The overall shot composition was very nice, as was the consistent understanding of exposure. Additionally, most of the footage was color balanced pretty consistently, with a few minor exceptions, like a scene with three off them riding around the college region of Danville in a car.
The overall lighting in the film was quite good, with the exception of one sequence: a late night campfire conversation. In the sequence, a rosy red fire burns in the foreground, but steady white light hits them in the background. To correct this, all that needs to happen is to take the file into After Effects and create an adjustment layer that’s been masked to cover the main characters and feathers out. To this, apply color correction (or Magic Bullet Colorista) to tint the footage a soft orange. To add the flicker, a second adjustment layer can be added with a darkening exposure level, which can be slaved to the AE Wiggler feature. (That, or you can use one of the plugins that has a flicker option, like those made by Boris and Red Giant for old film simulation.) This will create the look of flickering firelight!
The editing was quite good throughout the film. They used a lot of jump cuts in this film, which is normally a bad thing, but they did it correctly, so it wasn’t problematic. When used correctly, jump cuts show the passage of time or confusion certain characters and they were used to do so in this film.
They used greenscreen in a few areas, such as for a dream sequence, for a commercial featuring Captain Cannonball, and for some local news reporters. The dream sequence wasn’t keyed really well, but the fact that it was in a stylistic dream could easily have made it intentional and certainly doesn't distract from the film. On the other extreme, the Captain Cannonball commercial looked very polished and stylistically correct for those sorts of commercials. The local news correspondents with greenscreened backgrounds were a little less precise and more blocky looking than actual keyed footage in most local news broadcasts, but it still worked pretty well.
Another special effect they used was creating a dangerous shooting scene. In the scene, a maddened hillbilly fires a shot at Tony and his friends, blowing up part of a tree truck. At first I had thought they had actually set up a live squib to blow out the part of the trunk above the actors' heads (which would have been very dangerous), but, as I watched it through in slo-mo, I saw that there were matte dissolving effects at the edge of the effect. Unnoticeable when you watch it back at full speed, this means that either they combined stock explosions, like those sold by FXHome, with their footage, or they actually filmed a separate pass from their original footage in which they shot the tree and then combined it in post using garbage mattes to reveal only the gunshot portion over the original footage. Either way, it was quite effective and impressive!
