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The second and final glitch occurs in the ending of the film. (Despite the fact that we warn people that this is a spoiler, it really doesn’t spoil anything about the film.) Throughout the film we understand that the youths are running on borrowed time. It’s only a matter of days before the cops figure out where they are and catch up to them, so our protagonists’ goal is to make it to LA before that happens. As such, the eventual arrival of the cops is no surprise. However, the way it happens is. After all the characters have finally dealt with their personal demons, the cops just roll into the parking lot they happen to be in. Currently this feels terribly deus ex machina. For this to not feel so contrived, we really needed to see them do something that causes someone to call the cops at this final location. (Perhaps a waitress gets suspicious, or perhaps Cole, who has a connection to the LA police, actually decides to go to a payphone to turn themselves all in.)
They shot the entire film with an HVX200 and it looks really quite nice. Jenny Stolte did a great job with camera angles and Matt Olson did a wonderful job with lighting in most of the film. There were a number of night scenes in this film and they did a really nice job illuminating almost all of them. There was only one real lighting breakdown and that was during a camping scene where all three characters sit around a campfire. Cole and Nick are adequately illuminated, so that the HVX200’s extremely greedy light sensors could properly expose them, but Peter is not. This led to low-lux grain due to the fact that he just didn’t have enough light on him.
Brad Hansen’s editing for the film was well done and the intro credits were awesome. They utilized vector illustrations of the car on its road trip careening through animated backgrounds, which were created in After Effects. Despite the high technology involved in creating these credits, they reminded me nostalgically of classic comedy films that used animated intros, like It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World! This is especially great to see in a comedy that uses nostalgia as a secondary theme throughout.
Another visual area that they did well was in special effects, most notably the post-production creation of a thunderstorm. While I’m sure there were a few shots that were actually shot during a rainstorm in their 2 ½ week journey during filmming, most of this had to be created in post. While there were a few things that were just slightly off if you were looking for flaws, by and large these post FX combined with their sound effects worked really well! As these sorts of environments are incredibly hard to mock up in post, I was quite impressed!
One of the big detractors of most low-budget films is the audio, or, should I say, the fact that the filmmakers are unwilling to make audio a priority. To my pleasure, the team behind Driver’s Ed Mutiny did a great job with the audio throughout! My hat is off to sound recordist and editor Tom Haigh for his work, which involved mixing divergent sources of audio from wireless mics as well as boom mics in different areas and scenes! I only noticed one area in the film where the dialogue audio quality was a little off, and that was in a final monologue from Nick in his room, where the dialogue sounded a bit tinny.
The music for the film was great. John Kasiewicz did a nice job on creating a score that really fit the film and Music Supervisor Evan LaFlamme helped take care of the well-chosen soundtrack songs, which consisted of Indie and a few studio owned tracks. The only thing I wish they would have done for the soundtrack is to have a few songs from the fictional band, Crash Course, that Nick is listening to, since they made a point of showing that Nick had a tape of their music on the trip and since the old Volvo they are in is certainly old enough to still have a cassette player.
Technically, the budget is a little more than we normally do without bumping a film into our Special Critiques section. However, part of the film’s budget went to post-production marketing/materials/festival entries/etc. (which we don’t count toward the production budget) and we give a certain amount of grace to the $30K mark. The folks behind Driver’s Ed Mutiny definitely deserved this grace because they shot a road trip comedy movie that had a lot of the production quality earmarks of a Hollywood film at a rock-bottom price. The last road trip movie we critiqued that covered this many states was the documentary Finding Angela Shelton, which cost $300K to make! In addition, they shot this film when gas prices were at their highest (around $4.50 USD a gallon). In addition to gas, a lot of their money went to motel rooms, the actual cars used for the film, food, permits, production insurance, and festival rights to a few of the studio-owned songs on the soundtrack, all of which are very reasonable and logical investments.
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