It is tough to objectively review your own movie, but after watching twenty or so entrants in the 48-hour film festival last night, it is not difficult to compare our movie with the others.

Thankfully, the title slate was shown before each movie, so the problem that our film did not have a name/title was minimized. Lesson Learned: Drop in simple crappy titles using the built-in title generator, and replace them with the fancy shit later. If you run out of time, or the files don't work, or are misspelled, you will be glad to have the simple crappy titles, it's better than nothing.

Acting: Robin Marie Whitt (Whom I always think of as Lucretia, and almost called her that on the set) was perfect as the role of Miss Sterling, and she carried 99% of the movie all by herself. Very expressive and the camera loves her. Jeff Schaffran's role as the janitor was unfortunately reduced to a blurry distant shot, and while Jeff excels at 'distant blurriness' I would have liked to see more of him. Edward's momentary appearance was perfectly creepy. I won't rate my own performance, since it was straight out of the Chris Carter School Of Stoic Acting, but the event coordinator, Ira Livingstone, did tell me he thought my voice work for the DJ character was good.

Sound Quality: Our sound was certainly in the top ten percent of the 20 movies I saw last night. The only ones that came close were majorly Pro Studios, or majorly ADR'ed, (meaning the sound was replaced in a studio) We were one of the very few teams that took the time to catch good sound on the set. Unfortunately, we did end up with a line of ADR which makes me cringe to see it, but this was another valuable lesson learned: Make sure to film each actor/location as though they were speaking but with their mouth not visible to the camera. That way, if something changes, or something was missed on the shoot, that footage can be used with any dialog ADR'ed instead.

Josh's mix was pro, and so were his sound FX. At the theatre, I thought the music/dialog ratio was a bit high, but I think it was the house system's EQ settings being different than our own, because it sounded fine on my home system. I thought the overall volume in the theatre could have been turned up, but that might just be me being spoiled by watching too many action films in Dubly Surround Sound.

Score: "Conspiracy Hour" had the one of the best music scores hands-down, and I can say that because I was not involved with the music. Colin Mallon did it all, and it kicks. Intentionally melodramatic, which really added to the odd/creepy factor. Many entries opted for canned, or preexisting music, which I think is cheating, same to me as if you used preexisting video, but it was allowed if you had rights to the music.

Story: I think story/plot made the biggest difference for me in my judgement of the 48-hour movies, because it is a place that is on more equal ground for all the teams. The resources for a good plot don't cost anything at all, and I edged my vote towards those movies with interesting ideas.

While our idea was not particularly new or clever, I think it was interesting, kind of a Twilight Zone comedy episode, SciFi/Horror/Comedy/Drama. We intentionally converted our film to Black and White in post production, to give it a older, Twilight Zoneish feel or like a bad horror movie (with Fresh Step Kitty Litter instead of Blood...) Because I know this is our genre, it makes me laugh. If you thought the movie was serious, you might think it was lame, and I imagine some people did. But the tinfoil joke got a much bigger laugh than I thought it would, and the line "Now take out your mirror, and approach the Beast", which I thought was a highlight of the movie hardly had any response at all. The two jokes might have been too close together, and the one overshadowed the other. It could also be that after a slew of beers and clove cigarettes at 4AM, saying "approach the Beast" is just damn funny, and had we shown the movie in context (at 4AM after beers and smokes) people would have laughed as hard as I did.

Overall Quality: There were far better movies than ours, but then again, there were movies made by teams of more than 20 people, (some were really industry professionals) who had been doing the festival for the last three years. One goal of the 48-hour film fest is to encourage independent film making. In that light, there should be more restrictions on the entries regarding team size and budget. Perhaps the team size should be shown on the voting ballots. A movie made by a team of 2 people is more impressive than the same movie made by 20 people. I think all cameras used in the movie should cost less than $1000.

Regardless, "Conspiracy Hour" stood out among the contestants, probably in the 'Upper Middle Class' maybe a 6-7 out of 10. With some very small tweaks it could have been in the 7-8 range. What this tells me is that Next Year, the other teams better watch out...

Blog on,
-CZ

Labels: Conspiracy Hour, indie movies, movie reviews