Am I being helpful or just judgmental? who knows

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Group Critiques

My favorite part of sharing any idea I have is that I both really want to share it and am too nervous to actually share it. But I do like helping other people flesh out their ideas.

For our first round of group critiques, Julia talked about her idea first. I thought it was a solid concept, it's just that her pacing was a bit rushed. A lot of the things I've noticed in the past years' film openings that I've watched is that people generally give you the full plot, when really we should only be giving hints and leaving room to expand sub-plots or add new facets to the main storyline. At least that's my take on it.

Julia's idea had reminded me of that; I felt as though having her main character experience a vision in the first minute of the opening was more on-track for the pacing of like an 8-minute short film, whereas we are presumably making a feature-length film's opening. That's not to say that you can't have a series of cutaways to establish something about your character within the very beginning; Empire does that in the first episode. I just thought it was a lot for her to have that and a rising action, i.e. people being kidnapped, all within two minutes. Hopefully my critiques were helpful.

I also gave some critiques to Baloul; she had an idea where the MC was this woman on the run from her past, and although there were a couple holes in the story here and there, it was a good idea. Her main issue was the actual shots; there was a lot of fluff, namely the "getting ready" sequence. Myself and the other members of the group thought it would be better for her to trim that sequence. 

We moved on to the next person after that, but she had asked me to elaborate more on some of the ideas I had on how to allude to her being watched. In her original plan (keep in mind I am writing this hours later and my memory sucks), the film would open on a man installing security cameras on the woman's house, and then have a lot of angles that looked like security cameras. At one point the woman hears something outside, checks it out through the window, then keeps getting ready but faster.

I felt like she should cut the installation sequence and have it so that after the woman hears the noise it cuts to a high angle shot that implies it's from a security camera. After that, the woman goes into the next room, and it would cut to another high angle from that room. She grabs her stuff quickly, then peeks out the doorframe to see the window one more time, and then just cut to the outside of her house as she leaves.

Instead of the guy installing cameras, I thought that he should just walk by her and say a quick "Howdy, neighbor" (something along those lines) as she goes to her car, and maybe he's got a hat on that has a security company's logo on it. That way she'd have room to establish that guy later in the film (assuming this were an actual film) without giving away the fact that he's watching her.

Again, this was happening as a side conversation while the rest of the group moved on to talk more about their projects, so I didn't really get to say much to anyone else. By the time we got to me, there were only ten or so minutes left of class. I didn't feel like I explained my idea very well, but they were generally positive.

Sidenote

I've been working on a blog post since Monday; I don't think it'll go up until Sunday just because of how much stuff I'm going over in it. There might be some parts where I write a bit of info and then two sentences later be like "I was wrong. Oops." so just know that's because the post was written over the course of the entire week.