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For a people who missed it the first time or couldnt get it to work, the link is up again, this time as a larger but more visually pleasing mpg.
It'll will be available till sunday night...
www.feasa.ie/chronic.htm
<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ January 14, 2005 08:15 PM: Message edited by: Generic Skinhead ]</font>
Cheers for putting it up again, but it won't play.
File size is 71.1MB, have tried renaming it to .mpg, and .mov, and re-downloading it, but no joy.
Sorry guys. It should work now.
I missed this the first time and would like to see it. But yeah, it's not working.
I'd really like to see it.
I'm going to have to go against the grain here and say that I disliked the look of the film. I thought it was pretty much the worst thing about it. There is something about the way it's lit and shot that just screams "STUDENT FILM" at me and leaves my suspension of disbelief hanging lifeless from a tree.
For me the best sort of look/film is when you don't notice any of that stuff which means (to me) keeping it subtle/minimal and letting the actors and the script do their thing. Perhaps if the short had a snappier pace to it and just wasn't so abstract for so long then I wouldn't have noticed it, it's a fine balance with a large slab of personal taste thrown in [img]wink.gif[/img]
I don't want to seem overly negative because unlike a lot of short films it didn't bore me to tears or send me to the snack-cupboard. And it actually had a point! So it was pretty good.
I'd read most of the comments posted here so I can't say whether I'd have got the ending or not.
I've read all the comments here and I still don't get the ending.
"Coincidence sucks as a dramatic device", and right now it seems to me to be fairly coincidental that the guy escapes the dripping tap in the house and gets strung up in a tree. I just don't get the punchline. Unless it's meant to be a metaphor ... in which case, I still don't get it!
I'm fairly certain it's a metaphor. But I'd still like Generic to continue with his description/explanation (as I think many others would).
Some say that if a director has to explain his film then the film has failed. But this one has certainly been a talking point and if people weren't interested in knowing more then this topic would have slipped away long ago - so Generic must be doing something right...
I don't think he ever does escape the dripping tap though does he... when he's in the woods the rain is dripping from the leaves as well. Then he gets strung up, which I would guess means that he's trapped for life, and then we see that the woman is also.
I liked the photography also, gave it a 'Pi' feel, it is a bit cliched in student/indie films though, but I think this type of film is a valid use for it, and also as skinhead said, the protagonist sees the world in black and white. Also I don't feel suspension of disbelief is an issue with surrealist films, as one is supposed to be thinking about things metaphorically - personally I find this kind of photography helps that.
This thread should have died a graceful death and yet alcohol has prompted me to ressurect it once more.
I'd like to deal with some of the comments raised about how some of you say that the look `"screams student film" or whatever.
This quite frankly I don't get. Now, I've sat through a hell of a lot of student films, both within my own college and various festivals in Ireland and England and not yet have I, in all honesty, seen even one film that so much as approximates the look of Chronic. This is not to suggest that I am some wildly original maverick, but yet I cant escape the idea that people who think this film represents a student look is more to do with a preconception of what a student film looks like, rather than the actual reality. If you can point me in the direction of a film that looks like mine, I am eager to see it.
Everyone is familiar with the black and white stereotypically arty view of what a student film is, but I personally find this to be a cliche with little or no basis in reality.
As for the actor's voice, I would never consider doing ADR. That is what a person sounds like, i'm not interested in having a D4 accent or a neutral one. So what if he's from somewhere other then Dublin?
Miker I agree that coincidence has no place in a film plot. The tree scene is not a coincidence by any means...I understand what Justin says about missing the point as soon as you have to explain a film and yet...having shared the film with the board I realise that very few fully grasped what I was getting at. In reality, on the big screen I would say about 1 in every 2 "got it." I realise then that this represents a failure on my part to fully communicate with an audience.
However, before making the film I decided to make the film for myself first and foremeost, as a learning expirience. Given that plan, I was surprised it did as well as it did. What it has done is given me the confidence to make my next project the best I can make it and to actually THINK about the audience for the first time.
We will see how the next thing pans out.
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">I was being facetious skinhead. You know, humour. It sounds strange, but I really like the way the girl said ?No?. That was the best bit.Quote:
Originally posted by Generic Skinhead:
As for the actor's voice, I would never consider doing ADR. That is what a person sounds like, i'm not interested in having a D4 accent or a neutral one. So what if he's from somewhere other then Dublin?
I like the look of the film. It's good. It has something that most student films lack - it evokes a particular mood.
As for the script, I was completely correct when I said this:
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">You failed to appreciate the limitations of your medium. Think about it. Read your script. Then read a professionally produced script (The more outlandish, the better. I suggest Crodenberg?s Naked Lunch). You will find that no matter how abstract or recondite the subject matter, it?s all there and all can be shown on screen in an extremely conspicuous and fairly lucid way. I myself find it very difficult to overcome this limitation. At the moment I?m writing a character driven feature length screenplay. I know what happens to my characters, I know about their thought processes, I know what motivates them. What makes writing this for the screen extremely difficult is that film is a ?show me? medium. I have to break all these things down into a series of hooks or plot points. I have to make sure that I?m not swinging too far in the opposite direction, toward having tacky, ultra ? overt character revealing monologues. I need to figure out ways of showing this that are more or less cohesive to the plot.Quote:
The problem did not lie with your direction of the piece, but rather with your writing. I suspect a lot of what you wrote about the emotions or subjective experiences of the characters was overly subtle, and as such when represented visually was doomed to failure. The actors could not hope to convey all of this, and neither could you. To put it another way, you wrote a short story for the screen.
Generic Skinhead,
I forgot to ask and remembered a couple of days ago (rather randomly) about a question I meant to ask you:
Is that a sample of Boards of Canada in there (the little Scottish girl "Energy" documentary)?
I didnt get it from Boards Of Canada actually. Spookily enough though a potential collaborator wanted to use one of their tracks for the start of the film...i didnt cos i was afraid of copyright probs. Haven't really heard their stuff, but people tell me its great.
On another note, for any of ye in mainland Europe, Chronic will be shown in Berlin, Leipzig and Basel in late April, as part of the britspotting festival. Perhaps it will make more sense to the Germans and Swiss?
More info on the festival:
www.britspotting.de
<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ February 21, 2005 08:14 PM: Message edited by: Generic Skinhead ]</font>