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Lich

1 Movie Reviews

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So I've gone through this and I'm going to give some brief points which you should look into. I hope you find some of this helpful. When I was around 13/14 years old I was involved in a similar styled kind of filming project funnily enough involving rogue FBI agents hahaha. It was a flop, we had barely any preparation even with 90 minutes of footage.

Anyway:

1) Recording an actor speaking: It's glaringly obvious this was recorded all throughout the camera which captures the reverb of your voices bouncing around the room and barely hearable from outside, even through my ADAM A5X's I am having massive trouble understanding anything which is being said accurately. The simplest way of fixing the voices would be to sit there and rerecord the voice acting side of the movie with a half-decent microphone at home in a sound-dampened environment (you can make a DIY vocal booth with a few blankets and rugs to help out) and overlay the more accurate voice recordings over the video.

2) The FX: Oh dear. These are the kind of overlays I would fully expect to see in a 90's home video editing suite. Static low-res animations which are nothing more than tweened across the screen. What you should really look into for all of your FX work would be to trial out via Adobe's Creative Cloud, After Effects CC. The stock work you can do with it should be plentiful enough to essentially let you do much more appealing FX work and with it's plugin support you can also obtain from 3rd party developers the kind of out-the-box ready Hollywood-grade kind of FX work which would elevate this movie a little bit more.

3) The shaky camera work present: While I can see use of some form of stable tripod for the clips present in the second half of the trailer, the first half of the trailer featured shaky and off-putting camera work in areas where a tripod to stabilise the shot would of been much better.

4) The actual voice acting itself: Straight from the first clip onwards pretty much every single bit of dialogue which I can hear sounds very 'Wooden', essentially it sounds choppy and very unemotional. I do not see or hear in the words or the actions of the actors any form of real emotion or depth. Sorry.

5) Other Ambient noises: Outside there is too much wind noise and inside there is too much static hissing being recorded which goes along with the voicing. I hink it's fixable but it may require some time. Essentially you could try and cut out all of the noise which was recorded and try and recreate and properly mix some home studio recorded lines in sync with the videos and then level it with alternating footstep samples for stuff like concrete while moving, music present in the background and then incorporating anything else like FX noises and gunshots as required. There are plenty of sites which offer royalty-free MP3 and WAV files for this kind of thing for you to work with while editing projects.

In it's current state it isn't good at all. You can fix parts of it with the above suggestions but maybe it might be worth considering restarting from scratch and doing this all over again with a little bit more care, character and filming stability and quality. Even if you have to hire a second camera to get some realtime perspective filming to swap between without chopping then such a thing could potentially add more dynamics to each scene and make the whole project look more authentic. Potentially with all of this extra work you could consider after a refilking making it a 30 minute film filming only the most essential and varied scenes in the script?

I do want to see you at least try and get some form of success out of this project but I do personally believe that you have alot of work to do.

- Lich

Master-Awesome responds:

About the FX. I already use AFTER EFFECTS CC 2015 version. I don't have much experience with special effects and do go around grabbing stock footage here nor there, but since they still don't seem good enough. Any chance you can suggest links?

I started going into AFTER EFFECTS after my previous flop movie.

(This account is inactive and here in an archived state)
I started out here on NG. Anything not specifically on Bandcamp is Unofficial. LD-W is my main NG account going forwards, go there for new content!

Age 30, Male

UK

Joined on 12/25/11

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