Warning: Spoiler Alert!
The ending of the film fit the story fairly well, although it didn't quite dovetail into the protagonist's Achilles' heel of being a prankster. He didn't have to change in order to triumph, but only changes when people expect more out of him after his climactic triumph has occurred. This results in an ending that isn't as satisfying as if Tate had been forced to change his regular behavior to win out.
The general visual look of the film was good and the overall shot layout worked nicely. Unfortunately, there were some problems with the editing due to the breaking of a few cinematography rules.
The most noticeable one was the breaking of the 180 degree rule. (The 180 degree rule essentially states that you connect a line between dominant parties in a scene and cut to camera angles on only one side of this line. Done properly, the audience retains an understanding of the geography of the scene and isn't confused.) The fact that there were so many cast members further made this difficult for the filmmakers in post. For future films, I would highly recommend purchasing Per Holme's Hollywood Camerawork (http://www.microfilmmaker.com/reviews/Issue1/holcamwk.html ), a complete set of training films on cinematography that's very helpful at teaching the basic rules of shooting for editing.
The other issue that was often broken was the continuity of motion rule. Called a number of different things by different people, this essentially deals with the fact that you must cut from a moving camera to a moving camera, or from an unmoving camera to an unmoving camera. (This has nothing to do with whether your actors are moving or not.) Done properly, these cuts make sense to the audience. Failure to follow this leads to cuts that jar the audience.
One other area of the visual look that should be attended to more closely in the future is the actual view of the camera as it pertains to continuity. For example, in one scene, a mysterious sheriff's badge is placed on a table and in the next angle it's gone. However, a sound effect and a gust of wind that occur later in the same angle show that the badge wasn't supposed to vanish until that later point in that scene. The fact that it was already gone creates a situation that doesn't create tension, but simply appears to be an error. Additionally, there was another scene where Gabe is playing video games, however the TV screen is clearly visible with a still DVD style graphic on it. You can replace this graphic in After Effects with actual video of a video game. For future films, it's best to turn off the TV so that you can actually Corner Pin new video footage and have an overlay effect so that the reflections show through. This helps augment the realism tremendously.
The costumes work pretty well throughout this film and the effects, while simple, are fairly effective.
This film was recorded with a detachable Panasonic microphone. The fact that it wasn't a dedicated shotgun mic meant that the dialogue was a bit muddy at times and a bit hollow sounding at others. With that said, most of the dialogue was easy to understand, which meant that the mic was sufficiently close to the actors. (The one exception is from a confession scene with Nate at a church, where it seemed like the microphone was way too far away from him. For more on recording audio correctly, check out our article on this at: http://www.microfilmmaker.com/tipstrick/Issue2/ten_aud.html )
