Production log 30/04/2013 - Freelancer Feedback

I wanted to get a more professional feedback on my whole rough edit for my FMP, so i emailed it over to a friend who works as a freelancer in the film industry.

Here is a print screen of his reply and a copy of his text. 

Hey Mate hope you are all dandy! I have wirtten down some of my thoughts on your cut and such ... and hope you find them useful! You can ignore them of course or are even welcome to, because it can always be that I might have missunderstood smith. you wanted to achieve! Either way well done for putting this together with a freakin broken foot and verything! Works really well!

My first point would be the Black and white theme! I get what you want to achieve with it its kind of something you do atm. for music promos and videos BUT it should be more structured if you ask me! For example what I would do is make the interview sequences Black and White and the cutaways in color as I can imagine they look really awesome and powerful whereas the interview looks awesome to begin with but the brain gets used to it really quickly. What you always can do is maybe just desaturate maybe put a vignette or even a blurred vignette on top of it coz that gives it a nice touch in my opinion and you preserve those beautiful shots.

My other note would be the bit where they play acoustic in the living room! I really like that but unfortunately yopu can't hear it. If you have good usable audio with that let it play for a little while and then come back to the interview! Maybe even have a bit of interview then a bit of acoustic then a bit of interview and back to acoustic...And also watching further around minute 3 they say something about stealing music and making it better or smith. and then you cut to where the bass player starts singing I'd go to full music with this one cut the interview off and have music for a couple of seconds! That also gives the audience a bit more space to take a breath before a new stream of informations come round the corner.

a more general note is if you are doing music videos I think you should cut more. What I mean is that if you have more material ... use it! Or if you have a long shot where you go pan from hands to face for example get rid of the pan and make it a cut! The more you cut the better in my opininon  obviously dont go too far I guess its a matter of pace with the music as well!

Try and fade the sounds you have a little better when you come back to the interview. You did it a couple of times I think that you start the audio of the interview while the cutaways are still playing but minute 4:20 it kind of suddenly jumps back to the interview try having the audio a little earlier and cut back to the interview when he takes a breath or something.

Then another general note. Slow Motion. I personally don't like the slowmotion with neither Premiere or Final Cut... but with the awesome adobe dynamic link you can send clips to after effects and do it in there. If you are not feeling confident to do a timeremapping in AE then try slowmo things with frameblending. Again though that is a matter of taste. When We shot our first short at NUCA Craig and Me argued for 2 straight days on how to shoot our slowmo stuff we even made a test and everything so it is how you prefer it but I like it smooth 

The hairdresser thing is hilarious I would refrain from cutting away on that one and rather use the shots somewhere else to make shots shorter and more perky 

On a last note try and match the wide interview shot with the handheld pick up shot color wise... 

But well done mate! I really like it!
It sucks that you have so little time for it!
I realize that this is not a lot of feedback but I hope it'll help!
Good Luck with it!