Visual
Look
Before we get into the special visual effects of this
film, let's start with some general visual look choices.
One
thing that this film did pretty well was overall continuity
of actors and props. This is not easily accomplished in
any film, but is even more surprising considering that
it was shot over the course of a year and a half. (Not
quite on par with the four year shoot of David Lynch's
Eraserhead, but, still, quite a span of time to
be shooting a film.)
There
were a few choices in the general visual effects that
weren't so good. One was double-take editing. This is
a very common occurrence with beginning editors, in which
there is too much overlap between two scene cuts, so that
you see an unintentional double take. This can be corrected
by removing overlapping movements in the edit, and, in
certain circumstances, cheating a cut, so that we don't
see all of a movement, even though we think we have afterwards.
Another
issue was the choice to use a lot of semi-fast dissolves
instead of cuts. Dissolves are very tricky to do well,
which is why films very rarely use them. When they do
use them, they're usually long dissolves or they are a
fade-to-black (sometimes called a 'Dip-to-black') dissolve,
that uses a black screen as buffer between two different
takes. As such, many of these fast dissolves were unnecessarily
jarring, so it would be a good idea to replace them with
either standard cuts or a somewhat more leisurely dip-to
dissolve.
With
that said, let's proceed on to the special effects.
Considering
the low budget, they did some things in this film very
well and some things that needed a lot of work. I am a
big fan of pushing the limits of what you're able to with
special effects in the low budget community, but I also
believe you need to be honest about what you have the
budget to accomplish. At times, this film had issues with
knowing how to do the former while still acknowledging
the latter.
Before
we get into some of the problems, let's look at some of
the visual effects that were done very well by Mr. Smith.
Many times in the movie, the main characters reverse time,
so that the world around them goes backwards, even though
they can continue to walk forward through it. This is
not a simple task at all and was done amazingly well by
Mr. Smith. In fact, in all of the backwards-time scenes,
I didn't see a single problem. (There was one scene that
I particularly loved where Damon walks over a backwards-flowing
waterfall!)
Another
effect that is done well is a reverse-blur/pull effect.
This is done to show that two identical humans can't be
in the same place at the same time. This means that, if
you reverse time by one day, when you are done reversing
time, you get pulled back into your body where it was
at that particular time. You retain all of your memories,
but your body is still wherever it was at the time you
stopped rewinding. To show this, they used a blurring
effect that seemed to pull the time-traveling character
through all the places he had been over the course of
the past twenty-four hours and then back into his body.
