Monday 28 October 2013

Cinema/Idle Fanedit Musings: Prisoners/End Of Watch

I finally caught Prisoners this weekend, and thought it was a pretty good, albeit flawed, film. I think the main issue I had with it was that for a film that's getting so much praise for being clever, it was fairly predictable - if you've seen A History Of Violence and 8MM, you'll recognise pretty much everything that's going on in this film.

It's not a crippling flaw, although the third act does drag quite badly, in my opinion. The core performances and cinematography are very good, and carry the film as much as possible - though it would have helped if the third act didn't substantially change the tone of the film and take the plot into a much more generic direction.

One thing that I found quite odd throughout the film was that Detective Loki constantly works alone, even in several circumstances where it presents an obvious risk. His behaviour doesn't compensate much for those risks, either.

At first this just seemed to be another sloppy aspect of the script, but as I thought about it an alternative explanation suggested itself to me - what if Detective Loki were Brian Taylor from End Of Watch? Both characters are extremely competent police officers, albeit with very different demeanours. I can easily imagine Taylor being traumatised by a combination of PTSD and survivor guilt to the extent that he puts his job in a new city ahead of his personal life, driving his wife away and desperately trying to make up for his partner's death by being a textbook over-achieving police officer. It would also provide a great reason for Loki to insist on working alone.

Bearing in mind that one of the issues I had with Prisoners was its length (which in turn is a result of focusing on two protagonists), I'm thinking that a fanedit that refocuses the film purely on Loki's perspective could work quite nicely, using segments from End Of Watch as flashbacks to round out his character and flesh out his obsessive need to be a supercop.

Sunday 20 October 2013

The Equation Of Crime pt 2

So the last couple of weeks have been too busy for me to do any real amount of editing, never mind posting updates. This means I've only had a chance to get back to my Von Trier homage today, although so far I've been able to substantially re-work my opening sequence in a way that gets things going faster and also removes some stuff that was mainly there to mimic the Pi opening sequence.

I'm waiting for it to be embed-ready at Vimeo, but in the meantime here's my first pass at the opening sequence, using Clint Mansell's Pi r^2 from the Pi soundtrack.



TEOC opening sequence from That One Guy on Vimeo.

The password is "the equation", without the speech marks.

Update: Unfortunately I fumbled the export of the new version so while it's online at Vimeo, there's also about 8 minutes of nothingness after the actual title appears. That's what happens when I try to rush, I guess...

TEOC opening, version 2 from That One Guy on Vimeo.

The password is the same as the first video.

Thursday 10 October 2013

WIP: The Equation Of Crime

For a change of pace, I've been working on a short silent homage to Lars Von Trier's The Element Of Crime called The Equation Of Crime. I'm hoping to have it finished in the next week or two, but I'm still not sure whether it'll work out like I want - the ending is proving tricky.

On a separate note, I'll soon be making the switch to Sony Movie Studio. Most likely I'll finish my current active projects in PrE and switch when I start a new project. It may well be the new year before I start using it to any great extent.

Sunday 6 October 2013

Cinema: How I Live Now

I saw How I Live Now today, and was reasonably impressed with it. What could've been a tepid YA romance/drama against a wartorn background was instead a film about the outbreak of war in England, which incidentally happens in the vicinity of a passionate teenage romance. Good performances, good cinematography, some clever use of sound and a nastier bite to the details and atmosphere than would usually be found in such a film made for something that was almost as good as Children Of Men.

As a result I found myself thinking of other similar films set in the UK, and am toying with the idea of an edit basically telling the stories of various groups against a backdrop of an apocalyptic war. So far I think 28 Days Later, Children Of Men, How I Live Now, and perhaps Channel 4's recent found-footage dramatisation of the repercussions of a collapse of the National Grid, Blackout. It's a very rough idea, and would take quite a lot of work to polish into a feasible project, but I'll mull it over for a few days and see where it goes.

Meanwhile, I'm working on a short project called The Equation Of Crime, essentially turning Pi into a silent homage to The Element Of Crime. I'm still not sure if it's going to work or not, but it's certainly an interesting challenge. I'll post up more about it, including a first draft of the opening sequence, in a day or two.