Length: 04:37
Logline: After working crazy hard on an essay to please her teacher, a student loses it when she thinks she's not been given a good enough grade.
This silent movie parody is a decent attempt for a young filmmaker and should raise the odd smile. It's a budget-less production so look out for the problems which can come from that. Of course, using black and white was a must but not enough attention was taken on compensating for the lack of colour. It's not perfect, tonal definition wavers and without proper lighting some shots suffer from being too dark while others are too bleached out. Although camera quality is good, there's the occasional out of focus shot in amongst the handheld and static filming. Often too, are badly composed shots where it looks like someones head has been accidentally cut off. An appropriate piano track plays over the top of the action and text inserts and does well to maintain pace and indicate emotional change to the audience.
There's good use of the rule of three in terms of character, scene structure and overall act structure. Jessica Robinson takes the lead role and excels more than the others. Her performance is the more naturalistic although with melodrama at the heart of silent film, it's hard to tell sometimes. There's certainly some over the top acting going on but that adds to the comedy and is completely forgivable. The Nazi teacher with her single black rubber glove was a good character choice. 60,000 word essay! And that daft Jessica didn't sleep for three days in order to write it when she clearly had a full week.
The confrontation scene is the highlight with a good effort at an action shot which also creates good comedy (minus points for the continuity errors). Overall, it is what it is, silent film parodies are rubbish at the best of times as it's a cheap way of producing something but this is a nice enough idea and fairly well put together, considering.
This silent movie parody is a decent attempt for a young filmmaker and should raise the odd smile. It's a budget-less production so look out for the problems which can come from that. Of course, using black and white was a must but not enough attention was taken on compensating for the lack of colour. It's not perfect, tonal definition wavers and without proper lighting some shots suffer from being too dark while others are too bleached out. Although camera quality is good, there's the occasional out of focus shot in amongst the handheld and static filming. Often too, are badly composed shots where it looks like someones head has been accidentally cut off. An appropriate piano track plays over the top of the action and text inserts and does well to maintain pace and indicate emotional change to the audience.
There's good use of the rule of three in terms of character, scene structure and overall act structure. Jessica Robinson takes the lead role and excels more than the others. Her performance is the more naturalistic although with melodrama at the heart of silent film, it's hard to tell sometimes. There's certainly some over the top acting going on but that adds to the comedy and is completely forgivable. The Nazi teacher with her single black rubber glove was a good character choice. 60,000 word essay! And that daft Jessica didn't sleep for three days in order to write it when she clearly had a full week.
The confrontation scene is the highlight with a good effort at an action shot which also creates good comedy (minus points for the continuity errors). Overall, it is what it is, silent film parodies are rubbish at the best of times as it's a cheap way of producing something but this is a nice enough idea and fairly well put together, considering.
Best Bit: Bitch slap!
Worst Bit: Um, it's all been filmed in a school hasn't it.
Read a condensed review of this film on Twitter here.
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