Short film - Cutting the Lavender

Sorry, my friend...the film doesn't work. It's painfully slow, the main character is an utter bore, and the scripting and cutting are slack and unengaging. The dialogue sounds so stilted that everything looks like ADR -- in fact, it looks like badly dubbed English dialogue for a foreign film.

The main actor is stiff as a board, completely disengaged from everything he's doing. The girl is even worse; she sounds like she's overacting off a script she's holding in her hand, cold-reading for the first time. If the formalism of the behaviour were intentional, you might as well have cut all the dialogue out and made it a silent art film, in which case you could have gotten everything done with in a much brisker period of time. The film looks more like a collection of cool angles and transitions a photographer wanted to do, and not even close to an engaging narrative film. The premise was uninteresting to begin with (keep the line, don't keep the line? Film editing? Who cares?), and if you were going to make it about a metaphor for his feelings for the actress, then you need to make those two characters interesting and engaging. They're just puppets reciting lines right now, they barely sound human. And the story starts nowhere and ends up nowhere.

You have to use your coverage. Those phone scenes are plain flabby, as is the scene in the garden with the guy and the girl. There is zero connection. And you overused the music grossly. It's the same synth drone for 14 minutes, and it flattens out the scenes even more because we feel like we're stuck in the same place.

In the phone scenes, it's as if your actor allowed too much time for the other side of the conversation and you left all the extra air in just because you had decided, even before you shot anything, that you were going to play the scene in one shot. That only works if your actors paced the scene extremely well. Here, the pacing is so crippled that it's just plain annoying to keep watching the back of the guy's head.

You took about 14 minutes to tell a story that should have been eight minutes...shorter, if the current scenes were the only ones you had. This film needed a lot more thought at the script stage. Forget about the video quality, it's all smoke and mirrors until you have a viable story, characters, emotional content and pacing.


www.derekmok.com

I will work on it.

I am planning on my 2nd short film. Planning to make a lot of short films next 2 years. I will learn and adapt.

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I did everything from A to Z.

If there is a wrong in the film, I am the one who is responsible.

Working with short time frame and location difficulty, actors and I tried to finish the film.

I still remember the second day of filming, I just want to erase the memory of 1st day of filming. Actors listened to me and did I ask to do, they never complained nor made the filming difficult. Even it was a war zone out there. Some was mowing just 5 feet away behind the wall. Airplane, truck backing off, helicopter, siren, TV. Back of my head started to creep with sweat. I said to myself "Cool and be cool." Even with noises, actors did act on. They didn't say any single complains about the noises. Later we found a small room and record the lines only. I did some ADR work. They are great actors. There comes my crappy ADR skill =)

I didn't really go through with actors. I think I am belong to that director category who allows actor's free interpretation. Some directors don't care about acting nor delivering dialogues. I could have sit with them and rehearsal before filming. Just I decided not to do it. My plan was keep using same actors for my next short films in the future. So we could be a machine. However, it won't happen because some actors are not coming back for my 2nd short film. So I think from 2nd film, I will sit with actors and listen their interpretation and compare with my interpretation.

Having all the possible control over the film, I would totally go wild. I shot 10 tapes worth for 14minutes. There is a lot of cool and amazing (??!!#$) shots I didn't use. If I could, I would just go out like a crazy cowboy. I just didn't even bother to use cool shots. The decision wasn't painful at all. I simply didn't use a lot of shots because it won't work well. Checking and doing re-checking with myself was fun aspect of editing. Sounds weird but I talked to myself during editing.

I used a lot of jump cuts. Editing looks kind of choppy. After all Max doesn't have a full contorl, his life. At least, there's no single cut when he meets his friend Lenon at the food table.

I been around Film/TV industry for around 3 years. I haven't make a big break. Still, I learned the best lesson "Hear out other people's idea and listen before you do something."

Most of all, I couldn't have done it without my friends. They helped me and taught me a lot of stuffs.



"Parthenia" my 2nd short film will start filming in January. I am excited about it. Thanks God, it's Voice Over project. I don't have to worry about exploding bombs on the locations.

I know the critique was harsh, but you've always seemed good at listening.

I think you should go back a step. The root of all good writing is the personal touch. What made you create that editor character? Is there some of you in there? If so, what makes the character special? If you had to describe him in just 10 words, what are they? What's his favourite food? Where does he live and where is he from?

Also, since the conceit of setting a film in an editing room is un-cinematic by nature, is there some way you can make it more entertaining? For example, can you actually show us the scene he's cutting, and show how the "business major" director may have *&^%ed it up? There would be great comedic value in showing a serious dramatic scene hacked up completely wrong (eg. dialogue out of sync, a man's voice over a woman's lip syncing, bad sound effects, hackneyed jump cuts). I think you would make the central activity much more interesting if you could let go of the extremely serious tone and think about what might entertain the viewer. Consequently it's those scenes that make us like a character, the quirks. Talking about a character doesn't make us like him/her at all. The whole "you became a sculptor, I became an editor" doesn't work -- it's expository dialogue about back story. Back story is only relevant in so far as it impacts on the current story, and even then, you'd rarely want to show it through dialogue.


www.derekmok.com