I think you've got a good start here, but there are a few things that stuck to out to me.
The shot framings are generally pretty good, and the shaky cam works okay, it's not too over the top. However, it doesn't seem like it's lit at all. That is to say, it seems to be all natural or available light. Because of this, not only do you get a lot of places where you just get really blown out whites, but you also have a lot of really deep blacks. For instance, the couch in the first shot, a lot of it's color just creeps into pure black. Then, the second shot of the TV is much darker than the previous and doesn't seem to match up very well. I assume you did this to properly expose for the image on the TV. This happens throughout the film. There are tricks to get around this even without proper lighting equipment, such as secondary color correction. Also, the use of a dutch angle in the second shot seemed odd to me. The girl's hair and shirt also seems to descend into pure black as well. These same issues continue on and then we have the scene where he goes in the bedroom, and the mirror area is just lit by all this very yellow tungsten light, whereas the rest seemed to be lit by daylight. This causes quite an odd contrast because daylight color temperature is around 5600k, and tungsten is around 3200k.
Production design kind of mixes into the cinematography area a bit. The apartment is very bland. He's a HUGE gamer, right? I would think that we'd see Gears of War posters hanging around, Master Chief figurines, Mass Effect guns hanging on the walls, etc, etc. Granted, I doubt you have the budget for all that, I wouldn't either, but there's still the general point of it. The room is just very unattractive, a lot of the times we have nothing but plain white walls behind people, which gives very little depth to the image. You could really throw just about anything up on the walls. Maybe you'd want to put some pictures or plants in the background, just to add contrast and interest. This is a big deal for me, and always something I have to tell people when I do client work. They say "well how about we shoot this interview against the wall." And I have to pound it into their heads that a plain wall is boring and uninteresting. Generally speaking, you want depth and interest. Granted, it's really easy to over-clutter the background, but it's just something to think about.
Moving on, I think the acting on the guy's part is generally very unmotivated. He seems to be reciting lines and smiling through half of them. The biggest problem is, I felt like he was acting the entire time. What kind of direction did you give him? Granted, I didn't write or direct this so I don't know exactly what you're going for, but it seems to me that he's not taking his game very seriously. He's telling his girlfriend how important the game is, how necessary the game is, but the entire time I feel like he's just pretending to be a douche. The actor needs to understand this and be directed accordingly. He needs to know that this game is life or death, that is the most important thing in the world. You need to tell that actor that if he was living under a bridge, he'd be happy as long as he's playing his game. That is how serious he is. That's what what I thought the character was supposed to be. However, I just found it to be an acted imitation of that stereotype. The girl is actually pretty good, up until the end. When she starts playing the game, I find the exact same problem with her. The twist is that she's as obsessed as he is, but instead she just comes off as trying to look like a gamer, but really just looking like an actor.
The editing was pretty good for the most part. Fast paced and seems to flow pretty well. It seems well-constructed from the editing standpoint. However, the writing is my other big problem. It was predictable for the most part, and a lot of the sex humor (to me), just came off as crude rather than funny. I'm not saying I have a problem with dirty jokes, I like them on occasion, but in cases like this, it just seems like dirty jokes for the sake of dirty jokes. In the end, this guy is supposed to be just a douchebag, but to me he comes off on screen due to writing and acting like a whiny child. I also think this could have been half the length. A lot of it is just him reinforcing his love of the game over his girlfriend, and the girlfriend reinforcing her disgust with him. It takes quite a while to get to the point of the short.
I know this may seem like a lot or like I'm being overly critical, but there's nothing I hate more than in the past when I've posted a film and people have just said "it sucks!" (or variations there-of). I've sometimes gotten a little more feedback, such as "the writing is bad!", which is incredibly unhelpful because it doesn't tell me what's bad about the writing. So, I hope you don't think I'm trying to bash you or anything, just trying to lend my experience in hopes that we can help each other become the best filmmakers possible.
- Tommy
