Behind the Door - ID# 234

Homewood-Flossmoor
Dramatic Narrative
Entry Description

A relaxing night in for Jonah turns into a nerve-racking encounter with a mysterious light—one unlike anything he’s seen before.

Copyright Info

Recent Teacher Comments

  • 4/30 7:53 pm - I don’t know what is happening here, and I love it. Sometimes exposition is good to let the audience know what is happening in the world of the film. It is often overused as a crutch. You avoid this completely, which allows me to participate and try to figure it out. This helps build tension and you are not talking down to your audience. Thank you! This film is strange and unsettling in the best way. Some excellent cinematography here. To level this up, shoot more of the shadow side of faces like you did at 1:36. You can achieve this by utilizing more backlight. Overall, your contrast work is great. Shot at 1:47 was genuinely scary. Your sound design and scoring is also very effective. Nice work all around. Keep making movies!
  • 4/29 1:30 pm - The camera tracking in scenes where the protagonist is pacing back and forth and walking down the hallway is super steady and smooth. The use of SFX and VFS is impressive. It felt very clean and embedded in the world of the film. The attention to detail in the color design and textures of the film are super effective. The bright yellow appearing at specific times felt like a tool used to hint at us as the audience, maybe a sense of foreshadowing, warning us of what's to come. Overall really well done!
  • 4/28 12:01 pm - Strengths: Great framing and use of dialogue in the opening- introduced characters well. Strong performance by main character. Great use of music and SFX to build the tension. Overall pacing was strong - most moments were held for long enough (I enjoyed the sequence of the main character waking up and discovering his injury). Improvements: Contrast of black and white with the yellow lights was well-used; would've loved to hold on the light turning on (0:47) for another moment before transitioning. Camera goes out of focus at times - it's too quick to feel intentional, if it was meant to be intentional. Build to the moment at 2:12 felt abrupt - may have needed more sound or action. Cut to the next scene felt abrupt.
Judge 1

Positives: I think the sound effects and music definitely worked well with the story and built up the anticipation throughout. Some of the camera movements were very interesting and I thought carried the film.

Improvements: The audio levels are very high with the phone call at the beginning.I don't think this needed to be fully in black and white, I think some color might have been beneficial. The resolution of this film is confusing, I'm not totally sure what happened because the lights were everywhere on the street it looked like but then he stepped through the door?

Judge 2

Positives: Impressive! Using a simple editing/composition technique, you created an impressive and effective mystery, and some genuinely spooky moments. Your camera work was also quite impressive, it felt like close to every shot had a specific narrative purpose. Dope.

Improvements: There's a lot to like about this! However, when it comes to shooting in black and white, remember that your blacks are gonna be plenty more black. Your lighting can could use a lot more love at certain parts; sometimes it was a bit hard to see. My other critique is to not be afraid of having an ending; at times your story seemed a little too big for a short film format, and I feel like because of that I was a bit lost as to what the point of everything was after your main character woke up. Seems like a cool idea, but it's important to balance your ambiguity with something conclusive!

Judge 3

Positives: First things first, very tight story, the pacing is very well done and I felt engaged the entire time. I think you did a very good job at creating tension and relieving it with a few jump scares. I also have to give props for the visual effects the yellow light that you did whether it was rotoscoping or some other technique. It was very clean and almost entirely flawless, and lastly, I'd like to give some praise to the lighting. Things like keeping the key light on the far side, having nice fall off on people's faces and blowing out that door, which is not necessarily hard, but it has to be an intentional choice whether that's putting a diffusion in behind the door or some other lighting technique.

Improvements: There's no stakes. I don't know who your characters are. I don't know why they know each other or why the people are in the house who these people are I get that they're supposed to be an air of mystery. But I end up feeling more confused than I do intrigued I want to see those mask. People do something so that I am like OK I wanna join them or I wanna see what they're doing behind closed doors but because we get nothing from them, I don't feel like we lost our main character to their cult. So I'll leave it off with, the concept is strong the story is lacking.

Judge 4

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Judge 5

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