Please Critique my reel- Chapman University Student

[Robyn L Buchanan]

you can see it via link: www.robynbuchanan.net

 

Thanks!!

[Morgan Peline]

you can see it via link: www.robynbuchanan.net

 

Thanks!!

 

Hi,

 

The shot of the hand and the shots of the Chinese man don't do anything for me....

The shot of the girl in green (or blue...) talking to the guy in the alleyway

also doesn't do anything for me either - she doesn't look very appealing because her

eyes are all sunken in.

 

You come back to the beach kissing scene too often.

 

Some of your darker scenes are a bit to 'murky' for me....no contrast.

If I am doing dark lighting I always think it's better to have a highlight somewhere

...even if it's in a really small part of the frame. It helps you eye to see more clearly.

 

Many really famous DPs always try to have low tone, a midtone and a highlight in every frame...

 

From 'Film Lighting' by Kris Malkiewicz:

 

Caleb Deschanel: 'It is a realy psychological thing that happens. One of the things that I did in Being There

is, that in order to create the blacks that I wanted I actually overexposed the film, so the highlights were actually

hotter in order to create the illusion of the blacks being blacker. It is part of the nature of contrast. If you show

absolute black on the screen it is milky. I don't care how good the lab is, there is no such thing as absolute black.

Whereas, if I put a spot of white light in the middle of the black, that black will appear much blacker. Certainly one

of the reasons we used a lot of practical lights in Being There was to create that sense of black.'

[Joseph White]

nice stuff overall - some nice composition and some nice lighting in the bar scenes. one thing i'd suggest is just avoiding repetition in the reel as a whole - once you've used a shot or scene, don't come back to it as it gives the impression that you're trying to bulk up the reel time-wise. it's totally OK if your first reels are really short - even if it's like 2 minutes - as people want to see variety.

[Paulo Eduardo Uchoa]

I high recommend removing bars and tone.