* The alternate version of this video (with the other song) is on its way. It failed to upload to Vimeo yesterday and it's taking forever to upload to Youtube right now. All in good time, etc.
Here are the things I feel like I got right: There's definitely a palpable tone of female frustration about the nuisance of casual male power systems, and I'm happy that I found a way to make it readable to a general audience through direction (the irritating taunting of the male actor and the rage-y fist clenches/stomping of the the female actor), costuming (the high heels!), and writing (the bloody ending). I'm super happy with the way all the fish-eye footage felt and worked on screen (all thanks to James being a superstar DP, honestly), and how it distorted both the sense of the woman's fury and the man's derision. I think we got the weird "security camera" look due to the combined fluorescent brightness of the inside and the darkness of the outside, and even though it wasn't an effect that I really planned for, I still think it's interesting in the scope of the story (even though it sure doesn't match the quality of the Scooby-Doo hallway footage; oops).
Here are the things that I'm still winching about a little bit: The ending! Blergh! Like, I love the composition of the final two shots and I love the blood splatter, but it would've been 10000% more effective if I'd directed my actress, Emily, to make the *tiniest* movement a nanosecond before the blood sprayed (as if she were really doing a throat-stab). I think there are some obvious points where the editing could've been tighter. For instance, I meant to speed up the insert of the numbers changing as the elevator goes from floor 1 to floor 4 and then just didn't, so it's too long. Moreover, the actor looks straight at the camera as he's punching the elevator button and at first I thought it wasn't too noticeable, but the more I watch it the more painful it is that I didn't cut around it. Lighting was -- excuse me -- a bitch on those fish-eye hallway shots because the lights we set up wouldn't reach one end of the hall so it was kind of choppy, inconsistent light throughout. I was trying to push those shots to be faster because I was already taking way too long to get everything (one of my biggest failures as a director is taking one million years on every shoot; sorry James), so I overlooked our lighting needs in favor of timeliness. As for lighting problems in the big open cavern of a room right after the hallway stuff, I honestly have no idea what could've been done, even if we had, like, five Lowell kits instead of the one. It was just so big and already full of this tinny fluorescent light and we were shooting on the 8mm which captures everything, so I don't know where we couldn't hid lights even if they were powerful enough to fill the space. Maybe we could've talked about skipping that location. I don't know.
I've been thinking a lot about our class discussion about my movie, about how there was some discomfort/frustration from the boys and more understanding/validation from the girls. I'll definitely stick to what I said in class about not wanting to make anything that felt like a declaration about hating men. That said, I've been feeling pretty discontented about the response to a piece that -- after looking at it again and again -- reads in a way that is definitely confrontational about the way men are societally trained to take without asking and even condemning of this behavior, but doesn't damn men as a whole. The thing I tried to make a movie about is problematic behavior and I'm upset about it as a woman; it was a really valid and appropriate thing for me to make a movie about. There are certainly things that I did wrong in the film, but honestly I'm so uninterested in hearing a bunch of men tell me and the other women in the class why our experience isn't convenient for them. If this made some guys uncomfortable: good. I'm uncomfortable, too.
2/11/16, 1:20 PM
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