With that said, due to some of the consumer options in the HV30, there were some pretty huge auto-brightening problems. As the majority of this film was hand-held, this lead to a number of shots where the view would move from well illuminated to very dark until the auto-gain boosted or lessened. If you can shut off any Auto features on a camera, do so before shooting. If you can't, then you have to do a lot of tests with the camera ahead of time, so that you are very aware of when the camera will try to auto-adjust for you and avoid these situations like the plague. If the camera will change its gain if you change light levels, than control your shots so you don't change the light in the midst of a shot.
Another problem with using the camera effectively showed up in many of the night scenes, as most of the external nighttime shots didn't look great, due to the fact that they were underlit for the camera, causing the camera to boost its auto-lux feature. (Auto-lux is an artificial way for the camera to increase the "light" its sensors are picking up at the cost of quality and motion.) When you starve a consumer HD camera of light in night shots the auto-lux feature tries to compensate, yielding a low-contrast and digitally grainy image. (Occasionally, the filmmakers seemed to figure out a way to get the auto-lux shut off or trick it, so that it got an acceptable image that had good contrast, but that was less common.) If you can't turn off auto-lux, then you should pretty much avoid any night shooting unless you can add enough light to get the auto-lux feature not to engage. If you can turn it off, you still need to add enough artificial light to properly illuminate the image. If that can't be achieved without looking artificial, then you need to either set the scene indoors or outdoors during the day.
For future films, I would consider looking at a camera that you can at least turn off the "auto-" features on. I would also consider a make-it-yourself steadycam if as much handheld is going to be attempted in a future film. It makes a film much easier to watch if the camera is more stable than it was in this film. (We have how-to articles here at MFM to make stabilizers from $12 to a few hundred dollars, which you can check out here.)
In the costuming and practical elements of the film, there were some good choices, like the general costuming of the characters and a few nice pistol executions that used post FX for muzzle flash and gore. With that said, there were also some noticeable issues. The first is that most of the fights in the film had problematic choreography which looked more like people were flailing around than fighting. (The exception to this would be the majority of the final fight sequence, which looked pretty good.) For future films, I would recommend looking for folks from local MMA gyms or martial arts dojos who would be willing to work with your actors to create a precise, repeatable sequence for you to film. The second practical element involves the entrance of Officier Oliver, who shows up in a cop car. Kudos on obtaining a cop car for this scene, but, unfortunately, the police officer is dressed in a black shirt and khakis that looks like a cheap imitation of policeman's uniform. If you're going to have someone show up in a marked car, they need to wear a real uniform. If that's not possible, then have them show in an unmarked car as a plain clothes' detective.
When it came to editing, there were some really nice elements that the filmmakers used. For example, they did some really nicely revealing credits which were tied with sound effects at the beginning. Additionally, they did a nice compositing effect with the main character in the intro as he walks out of the light into the world he knows.
With that said, a couple of editing issues did show up.
The first was the breaking of the 180 degree rule. As a quick overview, the premise of the 180 degree rule is that you must pick a line to connect your main actors and then position your camera on only one side of this line. If you do so, you can edit back and forth between camera angles and left will stay left while right will stay right. Unfortunately, that wasn't followed during production and there were a number of shots where left and right suddenly switched around, leading to confusion in the audience.
The other issue that showed up was a black-and-white change in the middle of the film, which starts when Jason has been beaten bad enough to end up in the hospital. From here on out, every time we cut to him he's in black and white, while this effect bleeds or cuts away choppily when we go to other people. This may have been to show that the main character now sees the world as black and white, but he doesn't seem any more or less angry after being hospitalized that he was before nor does he seem more clear thinking. Whatever the reason, the fact that it wasn't uniformly used throughout the film is distracting. For color translation situations to make sense, there has to be a compelling reason that the audience can clearly understand. For example, in Memento, black and white connotes the past, while color represents the present. The black and white turns to color at the moment in which the past bleeds into the present as the main character chooses the path which will motivate the entire film. In that situation, it makes sense. In this film, despite a similar return to color towards the end of the film, it does not. (Plus, from a technical perspective, the low-light problems are even more noticeable in the black and white shots and there are a number of times where the transitions are sloppy.)
