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 Wizard Harvey Putter is the quintessential “bad boy” celeb complete with all the trappings. One night, he learns from Professor Mumblemore, Snogwarts Headmaster, that they are all characters in a children’s book series.
Harvey must join with his friends, Rod Cheesely and Hernia Grunger, to collect seven magical books, the “Hortexts” in order to free themselves from the world of fictional children’s literature. Finally to secure their freedom Harvey and his friends must battle their creator, author K.J. Bowling.
I’m going to keep this section brief because I want to spend more time with the specific sections below. Writing is good, with the exception of some jokes (see “lasting appeal” section). I’m not too critical on writing unless it’s horrible because I know how difficult the writing process is.
Acting, over all and especially from the three leads, is solid. There are some exceptions, but nothing that was too distracting. It shows that some effort went into casting and I applaud that. Too often people will cast for convenience or looks and then their film has terrible performances which negatively affect the viewing experience.
Editing is good and I have no complaints, so I’m going to move on.
The ending is by far my favorite part of the movie. I’m not going to give away the ending, but it is the part that I found the most humorous. It was clever and I smiled. Now, let’s move on to the things I wish to spend more time focusing on.
Additionally, shot selection was solid. Nothing mind blowing, but it all seemed to work and didn’t take me out of the moment.
The last thing I want to mention is the lighting. The lighting in Harvey Putter is solid and feels consistent. I felt like I was watching the same movie from scene to scene. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve seen the films where no attention is paid to any kind of lighting scheme and each scene feels disjointed, like it belongs in a different movie. Harvey Putter did, indeed, feel like the same movie throughout… except where it wasn’t supposed to. Curious? Well, you’ll just have to watch it. Good work on the lighting guys. Interestingly, I didn’t see lighting listed specifically in the budget, but nice job regardless.
Spoofs are typically shot on a much smaller budget than the blockbuster films they make fun of. Usually what makes a spoof work visually is that the filmmakers, with their limited budget, try to recreate the look and actual scenes from the blockbuster. For example: Superhero Movie borrows most of its visual look from Spider-Man. Meet the Spartans borrows most of its look from 300, and more recently, Vampires Suck borrowed from the Twilight movies. I’m not vouching for how good (or bad) these films are, but I mention it to make the point that creating a spoof is more than just a series of spoken jokes or turns of phrase; it’s also a lot of visual referencing and jokes inspired by the original film’s look and style. Visually speaking, I think this is the biggest place where Harvey Putter misses the boat. That said, I realize that budget is a huge consideration. Even though the spoofs I mentioned above had much smaller budgets compared to their blockbuster counterparts, they were still shooting with 20-30 million dollar budgets. That’s exponentially more money than most of us independent filmmakers have to shoot with. Heck, I’d be happy with one–tenth of that!
There were attempts made with green-screen backgrounds, but by and large Harvey Putter didn’t “feel” or share the same visual aesthetics of any of the Harry Potter films. Be that as it may, I thought the casting was fantastic. You did not have to hear names to know which characters were the counterparts of Harry, Ron, and Hermione. And the accents (given that the three main actors are not from the UK) sounded great to my American ear.
Costumes were another thing that really helped Harvey Putter and the Ridiculous Premise out. While there were a few costumes that bore a resemblance to something from a Sunday school class’s Nativity play, the three main characters’ costumes were great and really enhanced the visual experience of the film. I can’t forget to mention Dumpy the Houseschmuck’s Smurf-esque look, it was absolutely hilarious and one of my favorites.
So, as far as looking like the Harry Potter movies, Putter falls short, but I suppose it’s quasi-forgivable when one takes the budget into consideration. The costumes, by and large, were well done and the actual physical sets played well too. The green-screen backgrounds didn’t work too well and tended to take me out of the moment rather than serve as a catalyst to pull me further into the world of the characters. Again, budget was probably an issue here as well.
When making a film, short or otherwise, I try to write for my budget. It seems to work better to ask, “What can I do with my budget and still have it look amazing?” as opposed to trying to do stuff that, in reality, takes a lot more money than you have. You may not have $400 million dollars with $100 million set aside for SFX, but if you work within the confines of your budget, and are creative, you can still do some pretty amazing things. But you must not settle for a “that’ll do because it’s all our money will buy us” attitude. Bad green-screen images will pull an audience out of the story. I would have liked to have seen more actual/ practical sets because they feel and look real and, as such, serve the story better.
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