"Nasty"

Hi All,

We shot this film ("Nasty" in Feb/March this year. Several LAFCPUG members helped me get it out of a Canon XLH1 at 24f into DVCProHD. The film cost $75,000 or so in cash.

On this site, please go to "Trailer No. 1" and "Trailer No. 2", and please let me know which one you preferred of the two .. or at least which one you hated least.

I would also appreciate any other comments about the trailers.

Many thanks for your time.

Best

Harry


Harry Bromley-Davenport

www.nastythemovie.net

To quote:

Loosely based on a true story, ?Nasty? is the story of a fifteen-year-old orphan from Romania who?s been molested and used as a child porn model by her adoptive father, Peter, ever since he brought her to the U.S. at eight. She meets Matt, an apparent saviour, but he proves to be a pedophile himself, preying not only on Nasty (short for Nastalia) but a younger friend. Eventually Nasty frees herself from both men, testifying against them and beginning a normal life.

I'd love to see the trailers but my browser keeps crashing. Can anyone figure out why?

I've used Firefox and Internet Explorer. My connection speed is 54 Mbps.

What's the format of the trailers?

I have no idea why your browser crashes. That's disturbing. The trailers are in QT heavily compressed.

Best

Harry

I didn't have any trouble playing both of them. I do have Tiger, QT7, and really good DSL.

I think they were really well done (you know that's the buildup, right)?

I only watched these once through, so no going back to analyze what happened. This is also totally right-brain impressions--usually dangerous coming from an engineer.

The hallway scene near the end of #1 had funny sound. The sound up until then carried me along, supported the story, and I could totally forget about it and let it do its job--until the last scene. "Oh, right. We're watching a home video, aren't we?" Pulled me right out of the story.

Number two had really odd compression artifacts. Several times, people's faces dissolved into one flat flesh-tone blob. There were other times the picture broke up into compression blocks--and this is after the whole presentation downloaded correctly. This was as good as it was going to get.

--Even fuzzier impressions:

I'm used to two different trailers being versions of each other only shorter or longer. These could have been for two different movies.

Which one had the "Send me back to Romania" line? That one came the closest to telling the story. That one came off much better than the other which tended to be scenes smashed together rather than a narrative.

Were the blacks compression artifacts, or were they supposed to be there? Black stretches tell their own story and the story tends to be fleshless hands rising up out of the newly dig grave. I know it's a horror story in its own right, still.

I'll go back to engineering now.....

Koz

Koz,

Thank you so very much for taking the trouble to look at the trailers for our little film.

Tomorrow I will go through your notes in detail -- that is, the notes referring to content/impact etc.

Meanwhile, about the compression .. I would love to make it better, but in FCP I can only seem to reduce trailer down to 9k ... at 15fps. And it was taking forever to load.

So I discovered that little amateur iMovie has some freaky compression thing in it which reduces each trailer (2 mins each) to 3k at 12 fps, but you get the wierd smudging effects that you have observed.

I have been looking at expensive "studio" trailers and I see that the quality of compression is greater and the picture size larger. This annoys me, but I don't have the patience to screw around too much and so I bought this iWeb thing from Apple and did the website on that.

And, re: your comments about the differing versions ... Number one is what I call the "hard" version, because it has more about the molestation/child porn issue, and number #2 is supposed to concentrate on the more romantic aspect(!) .. and I refer to it as the "soft" version.

I'll go through your other comments on Monday when I'm in front of the material.

Many thanks, again, for your time and opinion



Best

Harry.


Harry Bromley-Davenport

<<<Many thanks, again, for your time and opinion >>>

Just remember who you're talking to. I always said I can get more entertianment value out of the back of a TV than the front.

Koz

> Just remember who you're talking to. I always said I can get more entertainment value out
> of the back of a TV than the front.

That's laugh-out-loud hilarious, Koz.

Harry, to me Trailer #1 is a little repetitive (I didn't watch Trailer #2 because I was at work). I think you can either chop it down to a more concise one-minute trailer, or add more materials. The way the shots were, I couldn't tell who was the main character, and the activities were about the same leering, porn-themed things from shot to shot. I think it can be structured more.

Also, you're giving away the ending on your synopsis! Don't ever tell people how the movie ends. That's like saying "XYZ dies at the end of this movie!"


www.derekmok.com

DM

Thanks very much for taking the time to look at the stuff.

I have taken note of your comments and will follow through on Monday.

I'd appreciate your comments on Trailer #2 if you have 2 minutes sometime.

The trailers have to be 2 minutes each for delivery purposes and, although I know what you mean about the synopsis giving away the ending, this websie is, at the moment and with AFM around the corner, primarily aimed at international buyers and a support for my sales reps.

In any case, many thanks again for your time.

Best

Harry

I think version two is truer to the actual story - without having seen the movie, of course.

I agree with some of the other comments though - sound needs work. It pulls you out of the moment and makes the production seem cheaper.

Also, there's possibly too much of the story in there - the trailer should set up the narrative question that makes you want to go see what happened. Even buyers need to want to know how it ends. If they get the whole story they get satisifed, then quickly bored and then move on.

Its like when you write a synopsis, you don't say - 'Jimmy comes from New York. He wants to find the true love of his life. He finds her in a small pub. They get married.'

You say 'Smart mouthed New Yorker Jimmy Malone thinks that life in Upper Kumbucka West is nice, if you're over 80. The scenery is dull, the work is boring and the people are morons. Except maybe for Mary, the one legged waitress at the Do Drop Inn. The woman with the pathalogical desire to remove his appendages and feed them to the dog. The woman who set fire to his house. The woman he has fallen in love with."

See? Narrative question. Why does he love her? Why does she want to kill him? What will happen? Much more likely to pull a watcher.

Overall, of course, the trailer quality is good. It loaded well, played well, gave me a sense of the story and the quality of the film, which was pretty darn good for a low budget. Fixing the sound will just bump it up another level.

I agree with Jude. A trailer isn't an artistic endeavour: It's a commercial for the movie. A quarter of the pleasure of narrative films comes of exposition and information.

There's something to the relationship between your voice-over and the visual content. I haven't been able to rewatch the trailers (no QuickTime 7 here; I'd watched Trailer 1 at work), but I remember it being promising but not fully explored.

What if the voice-over is the actual ad placed for the child-porn star but the visuals tell us the real story? Also, hold back on the beating up, the actual sexual contact. That stuff is shocking, but if you use them in the trailer you blow their impact. Suggest, don't complete the picture.

If you want to be shocking, maybe even present her in the beginning without telling us she's underaged. Present her as she would be seen by the purveyors of the child porn. That would put the viewer in the point of view as the people who would try to exploit her...and that can have a huge impact. See the family rape scene in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Disturbing, of course, but given your storyline, if you're not disturbing us, you're not doing your job! Part of the theme of this setup is that the whole of society is implicated in making such a situation possible; if you implicate the viewer (eg. Henry, I Stand Alone, Man Bites Dog), it makes the theme hit closer to home.


www.derekmok.com

==========================
"Smart mouthed New Yorker Jimmy Malone thinks that life in Upper Kumbucka West is nice, if you're over 80. The scenery is dull, the work is boring and the people are morons. Except maybe for Mary, the one legged waitress at the Do Drop Inn. The woman with the pathalogical desire to remove his appendages and feed them to the dog. The woman who set fire to his house. The woman he has fallen in love with."
==========================

Goodness. Somebody else who can write weapons-grade whimsey. I'm impressed.

Koz

I'm a big fan of your whimsey-work, Koz.

[Shuffling feet. Blushing redly.]

Thanks.

Koz