Haunting Reminiscence - ID# 393
Maine East
Dramatic Narrative
Entry Description
Cleaning the basement leads to a haunting discovery. Music courtesy of YouTube Royalty Free Music selections and Bensound.
Copyright Info
Recent Teacher Comments
- 4/28 9:18 am - Works Well - Fun idea and good story structure. Good job telling the story visually for the most part. Good variety of thought-out shots. Good editing. Needs Work - The music works well to set the mood, but sometimes feels a bit overdramatic. Acting was good, with great facial reactions, but at times it felt more comedic than scary.
- 4/27 2:07 pm - The story is well thought out and executed. The sound struggles in the beginning with some hums and hisses, but I also really appreciate it that you made the effort to capture sound for a lot of the actions. If you edited in Adobe Premiere, a trick is to add the "DeNoise" effect. This can help clean up a lot of those hisses and hums. Also, I would suggest spending more time working on J and L cuts. The camera framing was very solid. Sometimes it was out of focus, but aside from that, it was very well-executed. The lighting was consistent throughout. The acting was really good. Overall, I really enjoyed this. It was an ambitious and complex story – yet, the narrative was always clear. It is not easy to accomplish this in a dynamic short film. Nice work!
- 4/13 12:37 pm - You have a really interesting concept here! I like how your story starts out being very mysterious and dark, and it turns into something heartwarming! I have some comments about audio below. Most of your dialogue seems like it is muffled. There is some noise in the background of a few shots. When editing, edit with headphones so that you can hear those cuts when cutting from clips to clip. You have a lot of different camera angles, although I would like to see a blogger variety of closeups in your film. There are so many facial expressions that the main character shows at the beginning in medium shots. Having closeups allows the audience to develop some kind of relationship or have an opinion about the main character. There are a lot of scenes where it’s pretty dark. Sometimes the light you did use did not match the lighting in the setting. And that’s ok! It’s a matter of learning different color temperatures, white balance and practicing! I mention some creative ways to create lighting if you don’t have access to much equipment below. Overall, the video had great pacing. A lot of your sequences flowed together (especially the montage edit). 0:02 - There is a general audio “hum”. If you edit in Adobe Premiere, you can use the De-noise effect to counter this. Also, be mindful about audio gain when recording. Audio gain can determine the quality of your sound. The higher gain setting you have, the less higher quality audio you’ll have. 0:16 to 0:25 - I would love to see a cutaway shot of what is in the box before the character takes everything out of the box. This shot lingers for just a little bit and including that cutaway would help split that up. 0:26 - Here, you have two different colors of light coming into your frame. One is more blue, and the other more yellow. I’m not sure what equipment you used, or what equipment you had access to but it is important to make sure that your lighting matches so that it does not create a “muddy” look. You have two different color temperatures in your frame here. One closer to 5600K (Daylight) and one closer to 3200K (lights inside buildings). Your camera can white balance automatically, but sometimes it is incorrect. Make sure that you know what color temperature is used in the room, so that you can properly set white balance and match lights. If you use a bi-color light, you can easily change the color temperature on those. You can set white balance manually on your camera. It differs from camera to camera. But, you can usually point your camera to a white wall, or put a white piece of paper in front of the camera to read the color temperature. 0:38 - The camera here looks to be pointing up at the subject. I would have the camera eye level with the character’s eyes. This goes back to planes in a frame. If you position the camera looking up at your subject, your subject looks like they are powerful. This is usually common with evil villains. If your camera is pointed down at your subject, it makes your character seem small and powerless. 1:15 - Make sure you pay attention to focus on your subject. In this frame, the cabinets behind the character are in focus, while the character’s face is not. 1:38 - Great use of sound here to show the motion of the character! 1:46 - I would love to see a close up on the character to see their emotion on their face here. When you include close ups, this gives the audience a more intimate relationship with the character as they see their facial expressions. 2:16 - I really like how the frame is unbalanced and slanted here! It gives off an unpleasant and uneasy feeling. 2:48 - Great use of sound here and synchronizing it with when the character points to the trash can. 2:59 - The dialogue here sounds muffled and very quiet. Be cognizant of where you have microphones placed, whether they are boom mics, shotgun mics, or lav mics. Always double check your audio before filming on the camera. Check audio levels and use headphones! 3:26 - Double check your focus! Your character here is not in focus. The chair in the background is. 3:38 to 3:39 - A minor thing: pay attention to what your character is wearing between cuts. At 3:38 the character is wearing a black coat, and in the next one it’s just a gray sweater. 3:44 - I love this montage with all the natural sounds that you kept in! 4:09 - The right side of the frame is pretty dark and it’s hard to see the character’s face. Lighting is important, and it can also add emotion to your video. If you are missing a light, and need one you can get pretty creative with things around this house. You can try to open the blinds on a window and see how that effects the frame, use a lamp and take the lamp shade off of it, use a mirror and shine a light at it to reflect on to your character’s face (there are so many other ways that you can create light!).
Judge 1
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Judge 2
Positives: I really like the concept of this film. It has soul. You did a great job building up suspense when the character keeps coming across the photograph.
Improvements: Composition was off on some shots. Could not tell if stylized that way or not. Try to mix the audio and music a little better. Music was a little to loud and made characters hard to hear.
Judge 3
Positives: I like the direction you went when it ended about honoring them and the "haunting" if you will, basically being the lasting memory.
Improvements: I think it was a little confusing how it seemed to start as horror (seemingly) to then being about remembrance of your grandmother. I think it was most confusing with the edited haunting laugh. I think it would have been better to have a voice say "I'm always here" or something along those lines and then at the end have it say something like "I'm always here... for you"
Judge 4
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