Cute skit. Nice compositing job with the pier walking shot.
Technical:
- Shaky camera on what looked to be tripod-based shots. For locked-down shots, bumps and shakes are hard to watch. Do you have an actual fluid video head? The shot where he stands up to walk toward the light on the wall seems to indicate that you don't, and a fluid head is necessary for following action from a tripod.
- Exposure and color balance were all over the place. Do you white balance? Do you do any kind of color correction?
- Dialog was very muffled and heavy in the low-mids. This comes from placing the lav at the base of the throat, instead of midway on the sternum. The mic is picking up more resonance and vibration from the throat than acoustic transmission from the mouth.
- Locked shots were shaky, like someone kept bumping the camera, and this also led to jump-cuts where you were going for the "things disappearing from the table" effect. When the edges of the table jump, or the plate shifts as the pie disappears, the illusion is spoiled.
- Creating some sort of color shift for the "ghost cam" would make it more apparant that some special filter is being used.
- B-roll audio was all panned hard left, though the dialog was centered. This is distracting.
- There were some other sound design issues that kind of blew the image. For example, the cut to the empty rocking chair mid-interview featured a shift from the dialog mic to the camera mic. That interrupts the flow of things and almost puts the chair in a different time and place.
Sound design is a crucial step in selling the image. Ambient sounds recorded in-camera from b-roll is rarely useful in this process. Grabbing some stereo sound beds of the neighborhood using a handheld recorder (DR-40 or similar) and then editing them in under the picture will give you a decent foundation. Replacing other things that make sound (footsteps, clothing movements, drawers opening and closing, etc.) through use of stock sound effects or through Foley will make those things more present for the viewer.
Writing:
- The concept is okay, but needs some more illustration to make it work.
- There's a conflict between the main character's self-awareness of being dead/being a ghost and his admittedly not knowing who or what he is. He seems to be well versed in things like the white light and the "other side," and very aware that people cannot see him while animals can, but to have no memory of being alive would give him no frame of reference for knowing that he's dead. It's a dissonance that spoils the suspension of disbelief.
- He needs more interaction with the world around him. This was a lot of talking heads, not much action.
