Parthenia

Okay, here comes another "no-holds-barred" critique...hopefully you'll be able to get something out of it.

- Acting is a massive problem. The voice-overs are very poorly performed; the actors seem to be struggling. Did you actually rehearse them in the same room, in real time? Or did you just record them in a studio, each one alone? They don't seem at all connected to what they're saying to each other; instead, they sound like they're trying to "act" and instill emotion, but have no idea what kind of emotion they need. It's not specific. When the guy says "There's no houses at all", I almost laughed out loud.

The young woman fares better, but her character comes out of nowhere. If she's so contemptuous of him (which isn't a bad place to start if you want to make a relationship in the film), why is she giving him the time of day? You never gave her a reason to change her esteem of him.

- You need to start directing actors a little more organically, rather than pasting them and twisting them around in your frame like puppets. Let them find some of their own movements. Trained actors will find a way to negotiate the frame you want with the emotions they're trying to find. For example, you put that guy on his mother's wheelchair because you wanted the frame, and it looks awkward as hell. The actor looks uncomfortable, the audience is uncomfortable. It even looked to me like he's trying to sniff the cushion, and it ruins the scene.

- You need to work on your writing. "I go to Parthenia religiously, finish my mother's command"? "Nothing lasts forever, I need a break time"? I'm sorry, my friend...you need help with your writing. If you want to do films in English, I think you need a writing partner who can write English-language dialogue that doesn't sound stilted and awkward.

- Language aside, you're still taking the path of least resistance in your storytelling. You yielded the entire back story in voice-over in the beginning, and there's very little emotional impact. Imagine if it were an actual well written, well performed scene where the guy drives up, parks his car, enters the hospital (while hiding his grief), and then sees his mother for the last time, and he was gallantly trying to lift her spirits while knowing she's going to die.

Until you stop relying on weepy New Age music and voice-over to get across all your exposition, you're not going to achieve true emotional resonance. And when you direct voice-over, you've got to make sure the characters are "in the moment" -- listen to The Shawshank Redemption or GoodFellas. Morgan Freeman and Ray Liotta are both "in character" when they do the voice-overs; how they tell the story is just as important as what they're telling in the story.

- Why exactly did he fail those other times? You never gave a good explanation. Just more contrivance. You need to think through why and how exactly he fails, and show it, not tell us in voice-over.

- The library scene could have been interesting, but you make the mistake of underestimating your audience. The voice-over tells us exactly how we're supposed to interpret the scene, so the shots become utterly redundant, while the voice-over is a flat, uninteresting, even condescending way of giving us a message. Why not just follow the guy from the entrance, let him interact with his environment ("Hey, John, I'm so sorry about your mother...", "Could you put this back on the shelf for me?", then use the shots and his behaviour to tell us how he's trapped?

- The sped-up sequence is pretty ludicrous. You set up this portentous, hypersentimental tone, and then you do this MTV/Mean Streets/Run Lola Run thing? It's not that this couldn't have worked, but at this point your piece has so many problems that if you throw us a curveball, we'll assume it's a mistake rather than a confident left-field choice.

- "This one's a lonely one"? "I see a lonely soul"? Who cares? Never, ever, ever tell us who a character is or what he feels through voice-over. It won't do the job; it'll just reek of bad verbal exposition.

- Your music choices carry no surprises, it's the same weepy "oh-so-emotive" crap throughout. The tone of your piece has no variance; it's a flat line, no peaks, no valleys, no builds, no wind-downs, no specificity. Stop trying to manipulate us with heavy-handed music and let the scenes breathe. If your scenes don't work emotionally and humanly, that music won't help; in fact, it hinders, because the scenes don't support that kind of super-sentimental, audience-manipulating music.

Here, I could tell you that you spend 10 minutes to get through only about two minutes of story, but it'd be a moot point. The script was entirely not ready to be shot. Without working through the character arc, the plot arc, the method of exposition and the actual drama, any comments about pacing and length are useless. You need to learn how to tell a story, how to orchestrate events and characters organically, how to write an actual screenplay, rather than jumping into shooting shots you love. They will mean nothing until you work through exactly why you want to be shooting a certain shot, and story is what's going to tell you why.

Given the arc of the story, how I would write the script is something like this:

- Act 1: Guy goes to Parthenia with a guide, in a car. Through their natural conversation ("Listen, Mr. Smith, I've been here before, on foot, in a car, with a friend. I checked with the city, I checked the city archives. There is no house there." "Just keep quiet. I'm circling around again", we know he's looking for a house. We don't know why yet. (Setup)

- Guy gets back home, puts the sealed box back in the safe solemnly. Takes off his street clothes, makes a microwave dinner. The house's silence is deafening, distant sounds of people, children, pets. As he eats his microwave dinner, the guy opens up his window to listen, trying to find some human connection, but he's locked in his room, isolated.

- FLASHBACK to him arriving at the hospital, moving sluggishly as if slow dancing. He goes to his mother's room. Relives the last time he ever saw her alive. She is tender, more concerned for him than herself; he is putting on a game face, trying to convince her that she's not going to die. (Payoff for why he went looking for the house)

- He wakes up from the dream and finds his girlfriend already sitting across from him. "You went again?" "Thirty years she gave for me, I can't spare two hours a day fulfilling her last wish?" "Your food's cold, I'll warm it back up."

- He works at the library. Trapped by the shelves.

- At lunch, he goes to meet his girlfriend. He doesn't realize that he's missed her birthday. She leaves the table, angry.

- At work in the library, he accidentally finds an old map, detailing an old "Parthenia Lane" that's out in the middle of nowhere. Finally, after so many times, a clue.

- He gingerly takes the box out from its place again. Gets ready to take the trip.

- He drives out there and finds the house. He's almost scared to ring the doorbell, but he finally does. Inside is a woman who opens the box; it is empty. She gives him his mother's last message: "If you found this, it means you haven't moved on. Live your life".

- The girlfriend's at a cafe with friends, the guy watches from afar, then he gathers up his courage to walk up to her. She turns her head, sees him, and scowls -- not so ready to forgive him. He walks up, we cut to black before we find out how it goes.


www.derekmok.com

Sound issue - I am working on it right now. I will talk with a professional sound designers for future projects. I borrowed the mixer and lavaliers for next projects. I will ask my friends to be a boom operator.

Dialogue - Yes, I did record them separately. However, my intention was to sound like a reading a book.

Language - It was originally scripted and had a full dialogue. Somehow, I decided to the narration. I won't depend too much on the lines but Bleu was a child in a man's body. He was not fully matured. So I wanted to give him a very simple lines, very childish ines.

Yes, for next project, I will get a script consultant and work on the dialogue. "The Reader (aka White Desert) has a long dialuge between two actors.

Acting - actors and actresses followed my direction. It was my fault.

========

At least, I succeed in telling my pov story but it seemed I failed to connect to some viewers.

I will be filming 3rd short "The Reader (aka White Desert)" in June.

I have one very non-narrative project on the horizon for 4th film. It uses a lot of symbols. It's story of the memory recovery. The male character's head will be wired with different color and size of threads. The surgeon will operate by cutting off the thread. Each time, he cuts off the thread, he forgets the memory. In the other side of world, the female plucks out the petal saying yes and no. As she says yes, she sees him. When she says no, he disappears. This will be very personal piece to be.

Wish me luck.

Thank you again for good critiques.

Best

H077314

Strangely familiar...is that you, vic?

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

> However, my intention was to sound like a reading a book.

Then see Babe. A third-person omniscient narrator has to have a flow and articulation. What you achieved wasn't even close to sounding like a book; it sounds like actors doing a bad job at internal dialogue.

There are a lot of times when you can't explain away the issues on your film with intellectual ideas. It seems to me you do that a lot. But remember, you're not going to be at every viewing of the film explaining what you're trying to do. People have to look at the film and get everything. If you even had to explain to us that "I was making it sound like a book" -- if we didn't get that sense just from watching the film -- you've already failed.

> It was originally scripted and had a full dialogue. Somehow, I decided to the narration. I won't
> depend too much on the lines but Bleu was a child in a man's body.

I don't really get the connection between these decisions. Taking away all his onscreen dialogue isn't going to help us get that he's a child in a man's body. In fact, by never allowing us to watch the guy without intrusive voice-over, you've doomed us to never get any real sense of what he's like. And his "woe-is-me" expressions ring hollow, like he just ate something sour, because we have no emotional basis for knowing why he's looking like that.

> for next project, I will get a script consultant and work on the dialogue

Dialogue isn't the only problem.

You need a screenwriter. Someone who will listen to your ideas and translate them into something dramatically workable. You need someone who can adopt your intellectual ideas into a dramatic, human realm, one that's actor- and film-friendly.

Here's another suggestion. Everything you wrote above is intellectual and esoteric. And judging from the two works I've seen from you, I think you're trying to make the wrong kind of film. Your ideas don't lend themselves to dramatic narrative. It really sounds to me like you should be making purely experimental, symbolic films. Instead, what I've seen are films that try to be narrative, and that attempt dooms them to fail because they set up the audience for false expectations. It sounds to me like you should be trying to make Meshes of the Afternoon.

So for your next film, I'd start from an expectation that your audience is smart. Don't use such on-the-nose emotional music. Don't use voice-over as a crutch. Just show the symbolic imagery, and set it up in the first 45 seconds so that it's blatantly obvious that it's an experimental film where nothing is going to be obvious. Think up an experimental, expressionistic sound design.

Half of winning over a viewer is in setting up the right expectations. If you hadn't used such blatant voice-over in this current piece, if you hadn't tried to shoot it like a narrative drama, I think it would have worked better. For example, try taking out all the sound from your current cut. Now try this kind of sound design:

Scene 1 -- Son and mother. No dialogue, no voice-over. The sound of the delivery room when he was born. Sounds from his childhood. The voice of a young mother. Sounds of his college graduation.

Scene 2 -- He's travelling to the place. Mother reads her own will. Not too much emotion; mothers talk to their children with a certain kind of facility and casualness, not overwrought emotion.

Scene 3 -- Library. Sounds of everybody around him, but muffled, like he's detached from him. Voices reading various books from various sections, different voices for different works -- eg. a child reads Charlotte's Web, an old man reads about World War II, a sexy female voice reads from a romance novel.

Scene 4 -- Banker. This scene serves no function. I'd lose it. But if you had to keep it, try reading straight off his resume, dry. Chances at humour here.

And so on.

One last note: Never do blue letters on a blue sky for any title. Let alone your opening title.


www.derekmok.com

The main things that automatically stood out to me were the blue title (hard to read) and why is the entire clip squashed? Derek covered everything else in detail.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Strangely familiar...is that you, vic? <-- No, I am not.

--

I miss my college days. You guys make me up my missing school days =)

I will keep making something. I have to try and do something.

Best

h077314

Strange name signature: h077314. Are you related to THX-1138?

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

077314 means olleh which is hello. It was one of beeper code.

Since you gave me opportunity to post something, I'd like to share about my filmmaking.

There's no absolute control on the film. It's all about keeping my idea and plan everything as much as I can.

Reduction is always factor: I have to change my scenes according to the location, acting and sound. I have to give and take.

I am keeping the music because she is a cool person. Originally, some musics were totally different. A composer talked me over and gave in to her because I take a relationship first. I don't really like the ending song. Originally, the ending song starts at the credit. Still, I read a lot of directors breaking their relationships over the films. You name famous directors, most of them damaged relationships with others to keep his ego. It's a good thing but I am not gonna do that on 9 minutes short.

While I driving, I felt fortunate that I know my weakness and mistakes now.

I won't ever make the perfect film, never. However, I can keep tell my story and shape my style.

I have an opportunity to learn about the film and art. Depend on the film, I play the balance between them. It's a joy.

Best

h077314

> I am keeping the music because she is a cool person.

You mean the composer?

While being nice to your collaborators is a good thing, it's not a good reason to do something in the editing room. If the music intrudes on the scene, or is too on the nose, you do yourself -- and the composer -- a disservice by keeping it in for the wrong reasons. It makes the composer look like s/he doesn't know how to fit music to a scene. Just like if your actor gives a great performance in a scene that doesn't make sense in the story (eg. Michael Biehn in Terminator 2: Judgment Day -- James Cameron cut out the most important male character who had been in the first Terminator).

On my thesis film, I was working with a great young composer who was the son of David Sanborn, and I also removed his music from the most pivotal scene in the film. I had asked him to compose something while knowing (and telling him so) that I may not use it, but wanted to try it. I ended up using only enhanced ambience, and the composer loved the final result. It puts everybody in a good light when the film works, and you have to trust your people to understand and support your creative decisions.

For the sake of the film, for your own sake, for the sake of everybody involved in the film, make the right choice.

> You name famous directors, most of them damaged relationships with others to keep his ego.

We all talk about how cool it is when a team works without ego. The fact of the matter is, ego is a part of the personality of every good or great creative person. It's that which makes one passionate about creating something unique and ambitious; it's that which makes you go the extra mile. And it's that which makes you dislike something that may be wrong in your work. A creative artist without any ego would be bland. Wwhen people say "no egos" on a great project, they just mean "no friction", that the egos make room for one another.

If you didn't like the ending song, why don't you ask the composer to try something else? It doesn't have to be nasty. It's in the service of the film. If your team is mature, and good at what it does, then your people don't need you to shelter them from whatever's wrong. A good creative team deserves to be pushed towards greatness.


www.derekmok.com