Portlandia sketch

[Tom Frisch]

A friend and I made this Portlandia sketch for a local film contest. I don't love the lighting, got crossed colors from the window and the lights, but did the best I could in Colorista to repair. Feedback or suggestions are welcome.

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-Tom

[Andrew Parker]

I liked the sketch, very funny, well thought out and acted. The lighting was not much of an issue for me considering it is an empty room with bare walls.
Great job.

[Charles Papert]

Hi Tom:

Good content (which is always first and foremost)!

Yes, it's probably not ideal that you have mixed color temps going on there but it's not a dealbreaker by any means. The directionality looks better on the girl than the guy.

More of an issue for me was the composition of the wider over-the-shoulder shots--strangely cramped into the middle of the frame. I'm curious if that was a choice? It felt a little as if you were lined up with the tighter version (with a little foreground shoulder in frame) and simply zoomed out for the wider one without adjusting laterally to open up the space between them a little.

Often with a sketch this simple it becomes a "talking heads" scenario where the edit just ping-pongs back and forth between similar shots, which can become repetitious. You do seem to have a wider two-shot which doesn't appear until the very end, curious why that wasn't used in the middle somewhere as well. For a sketch of this length and this static, I would have made sure to have three different sizes of coverage on each side, for starters. As a point of reference:

here

Due to our schedule constraints I had to keep things to "meat and potatoes" coverage but still fit in the three sizes on each side, along with special overs to the waitress and her singles plus establishing shot. In a perfect world we would have been able to dolly in from the medium to tight size during the final order (culminating in "human foot") for extra emphasis but didn't have time. FYI the shot at :14 is very similar to your stacked compositions I was talking about above--my assumption is that was a first take which we subsequently fixed, but was chosen for performance reasons. Oh well.

Back to your piece: the shots featuring props (t-shirt, hookah) are somewhat "neither here nor there" in composition--the frame is forced down slightly to hold the prop but it should be either more or less (she brings the t-shirt higher so you don't have to reframe for it, or lower so you can tilt down completely off her face). The crop just above her eyes feels odd.

These are all fairly subtle points because the comedy still comes through in the sketch and obviously it's doing OK with the votes over at FOD (tough room over there!), so good job!

[Tom Bostick]

haha loved it!