Hi,

I worked on the camera/lighting and editing on this short fun film.

YouTube - Calamity Cake

Rob Lone wrote and directed it. Two girls end up fighting over a man in the kitchen. Inspired a little by Spaghetti westerns. It was quite a challenging shoot. One of the models/actress did not turn up, so we had to drag the makeup girl to play the missing part. Fortunately no dialogue, so made things easier for her and she did ok. Let us know what you think.

Thanks
Alex

Just my take on it. It seems as though whoever mastered the spinning cleaver technique, needed a vehicle to show it off. This wasn't it.
It could have been interesting or exciting, even without the dailogue, but it was waaaaay too drawn out. Nice spining knives though.

Yeah I have to agree with zero there. It was a bit slow.
Also the toast didn't seem to toast in the toaster, but magically did so in the blokes hand after he'd started eating it?!!?

I don't get the jump to black and white... why not make the whole thing black and white, as it looked much better than it did in colour. (Red light bleeding through the curtains, and white balance shifts on close up shots)

And a meat cleaver for chopping tomatoes?

A good effort though, but there are quite a few bits I would change in the shoot and post.

Thanks for your constructive comments Zero and MOSH.

I have to agree with your feedback. Unfortunately, the shoot had a lot of problems and also I wasn't around to do the the pickup shots and the guy did not set white balance or lighting properly. The red light on the curtains was done on purpose for the silhouette shadow fight scene. Maybe it did not work.

The director wanted to go into Black and White as a homage to Natural Born Killers, as there is a B/W scene of a spinning cleaver shot there.

I had already cut out a lot of stuff that the director wanted in, but maybe I should have been even more brutal on the edit. He himself thinks its far below what he originally planned, but I think it could have ended up much worse.

The trick i've learnt with editing is to be brutal, then look back at your edit a few days later, and be even more so. It's always painfull to have to cut bits out, but many times have I looked at one of my 'finished' videos a few days later, only to spot more bits that could do with being given the chop.

Also in my experience, ignoring the director can help occassionaly. They may well have an idea of what they want, but that's not a garantee that they're right. I've produced a handfull of edits of the same promo for one company, each of them their own ideas. Yet the only one they were happy with was the one I did my own way. They even thanked me for it in writting