In the beginning, the story and dialogue was TOO reminiscent of Sin City. It was, however, good.

The hallway shots of the main character walking and the killer walking felt out of place. The color, the camera movements and just the overall look of those scenes threw off the whole begining sequence. It wasn't "stylish" enough.

The acting was good and I must agree with Rob. The scene with the lead showing his rage and the fade to black was great.

The whole poker table scene was fun. It made me chuckle and from here on out, the short really starts to establish itself as a noir film. You started good, but like I said, the walking sequences threw it off, at least for me.

The ending was a nice twist, but I honestly felt it was predicatable. When he got shot in the stomach (or wherever else he got shot that didn't kill him), my first thought was that it was her...actually, my first thought was that it was her TWIN sister =P

Overall, I thought it looked great for the most part and it kept me watching 'till the end, wanting to know what happenes next. Entertaining short, I'd like to see more of your stuff.

And the question everyone is asking, Why?

EDIT: Kris, I forgot to mention that yes, I noticed the beginning sequence where the female is in color and the rest is B&W. That is my fav. sequence. Looks really nice and crisp. Very cleanly done.

No we did not use a 35mm adapter. This short was way too low budget for that.

The depth of field was a trick in After Effects. It shouldn’t really be called a trick, because it is a long process. Basically I used layers of video with animated masks to focus on the areas I wanted and then used animated Gaussian blurs to “de-focus” the other areas. There were at least 5 different layers in that one shot.

This worked very well for the hand and card because there was little movement. Doing this with multiple people would have been very difficult.

-Kris Galuska

nice, I just posted a short 1 minute film in another thread, for the film noir fans maybe also a nice thing to look at. also wondering what you think.

http://www.grijzewolken.nl/vzion/pro.html

Very nice ... I liked it very much. Although I'm inclined to agree with the poster that said it felt Sin City-esque, especially his voice. It reminded me so much of Josh Hartnet's intro in Sin City. His comments about the hallway sequence I agree with as well.

Cool!

Great voiceover and music. Did you do the music yourself?

It almost feels like it should be a commercial for a TV show. Or, you could rewrite it as a commercial for a product, kind of like the film noir Aflac commercial.

Good job.

-Kris Galuska

Thanks, and no, I must give credit to Miles Davis for the music here. We are planning to make a longer version, longer then a minute so you can actually have a plot in the film ;). And for that version we also want to have an o.s.t.

Don't know that commercial, they don't show that in Holland. Can I watch it somewhere online?

Nice exercise. Got the "Sin City" look / sound down very well.

Thanks, this really was an exercise. Since it was my capstone project I wanted to show a wide range of my abilities. Instead of having a demo real with different clips I though one short would be better. It shows pacing and development that a clips reel never has.


-Kris Galuska

It looks very good!