Monday, October 13, 2008

DV: "Chris is a faliure" party


So... a week in Vancouver and home in time for thanksgiving ... Full with turkey and joy I find a legal size piece of paper with miserable handwriting.

On my door are four requests: contact our producer Rich, get measurements for an elf costume, post on the blog, and comment on his long-neglected documentary. I was hoping for more of a letter of apology.

Now I'm hitting two birds with one stone by letting you know that the OCT 13th edit is a boring disaster. The "Chris is a failure" party will happen with amazing success.

His Documentary starts off good but quickly dissolves into a bunch of talking heads for 20 minutes. I don't know who's-who, no 1/3 captions, audio is all over the place I'm holding the volume knob while taking down notes. No music, I don't know what the question is sometimes.

This is an assembly, not a rough cut. A "rough" cut is just a term. "Rough" is NOT a description of what your aiming for.

The good news is that I laughed hard twice (having seen it in before) and I know there is enough to make a good edit. Not the 28 minute audio-visual misery that I witnessed today.

The doc is about a video game that women play in large percentages. I know about 100 million nerds who's brains just exploded hearing that. We, the audience, only find this out until 20 minutes in. My constructive criticism would be to focus on breaking this doc into three pieces. Mix things up every minute or two with music and footage of the gameplay or anything else for that matter.

Where do they live in Arizona? Why Arizona? Use stock footage from Arizona! The characters talk about the great culture surrounding the film... but no footage from the comic-con or sound bites from their archived radio show. They must have plenty of funny sound bites you can use.

Dear Chris,
You can't just package any-ole-edit. The majority of the people who watch it at your soul crushing party need to give you a thumbs up. And what you have right now needs major work.

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