For those of you who watch lots of Student Films

Or go to lots of Student Film Festivals and like to get REALLY drunk.

[web.mac.com]

Michael Horton
-------------------

Hey guys,

Wine and beer are really cheap here...
You can get drunk with less than $5.

Rui Barros
Editor Colorist Trainer
Lisbon, Portugal
RTP Post-Production
Apple Certified Trainer FCP 7
Apple Certified Pro FCP 7

I can say my thesis film had these:

- clock close-ups... (but at least I didn't do a "waking up" scene)
- black leader
- colour with black-and-white
- mechanical typewriter (but there was a story reason -- it actually happened in real life)

Films I've cut that have these:
- ECU cigarette being lit
- "running into the woods" to escape a situation (don't ask)
- tapping a microphone...as a score, not heartbeat.
- flopped shot -- some idiot camera operator shot the two sides of a boxing ring with the characters facing the exact same way!!!

But hey, some of these are unfair. That's like making fun of Munich because the characters were using AKS-74Us, or of The Believer for using black-and-white in the Nazi dream sequences. Some clichés are such because they are true!


www.derekmok.com

Its true some of them are unfair, but still funny. I especially loved this one : "The opening title sequence is better than the rest of the film. Drink again if it is actually longer than the rest of the film."

One of the biggest mistakes I ever made as an editor was to make the endscroll for my thesis film so slow that it took two and a half to three minutes to complete. Friggin' dumb. You could smell the comas in the theatres and 500 brains screaming "The movie's over! Move it!"


www.derekmok.com

lol nice one. One of the worst things I did was get a job near the end of my uni career and have to leave the making of the last few minutes of the (10 min) documentary to the rest of the people in my team. Not that I was in any way better than them, just that my style of writing was noticeably different to theirs, and the conclusion fell quite flat because I was building to a specific point that they weren't.

So it was one of those films where there's a great 3D opener, then a good solid build up to an interesting point, then a wild skew off to a completely different opinion. Very hard to watch at the end of year industry screenings!