Movie Comp. Critiques of 'The Brothers'
Would love some feed back on this movie!
Many thanks
Chris 'cfcporter1962'

Thanks for being so receptive to the offer by the judges to give constructive critiques, upon request, hopefully helping you to produce even better movies in the future. Over the coming days, individual judges will be making comments in this thread.

Again, thanks for participating in this IL2 Movie Competition.

Hi Chris, I'll get some thoughts together and post up some comments as soon as I get some time.

Hello Chris,

I am working away from home until the end of this week, but i will put my review against your movie after that.

Cheers
Monty-Dan

Well Chris, it's great that you had a go and produced and submitted a movie to the competition. The more newcomers to our hobby the better and we all have to start somewhere.

My main suggestion to you for making improvements is to put on a critical hat and watch some of the best movies out there, and start with the competition winners. Ask yourself just what it is that makes these movies great, why do we watch them and what makes them entertaining?

In your movie, there are some ideas roughly joined together. However, it plays more like watching an online mission as opposed to a movie. Do you see what I mean? The main job of a movie is to immerse the viewer into the world you have created, and keep their attention, not just portray a series of events. All the great movies do this.

There's no secret shortcut to learning this. There's no trick I can tell you about. This first step in becoming a movie maker has to be learned personally. It can be learned from experience, or by studying.

I know that's not a lot of specific help, sorry, but hopefully you can see what I'm driving at?

Good luck!

I'm not in the forums much these days, but I didn't recognize your name, so I assume you're fairly new to the community here. I salute you for taking on the challenge of submitting a film to this competition.

I've written critiques for a number of films that others have made, and you and the other filmmakers here might find some value in reading those comments and watching those films. They can be found at MrVH's Web site (click on the link in my sig block below to 'Machinima Movie Theatre').

But you asked for feedback about your film, so I'll give you my thoughts.

You made a fine film and one that just a couple years ago would have made a big splash in the forums. It's got a lot of good things going for it, however, you don't learn much if people just point out all the things you did well. For that reason, I'll focus on the areas I thought could use improvement. That may make the tone of this sound rather negative, but I just don't have the time to balance out every niggle with praise in another area. I hope you understand.

That said, I'll just dive right in.

The opening titles passed a little fast. I had to rewind the film to finish reading them. Give the slower readers out there enough time to finish before fading out titles. Also, I would have kept the font sizes on each page the same. I noticed the last page of the opening titles had a larger font size, which looked out of place.

Between 00:40 and 00:46 there was a small but noticeable amount of mouse panning. There are tutorials about how to smooth out panning without using the mouse, although I think it was accidental in this case, so my comment would be to check your video more closely to make sure you don't have anything like that.

If two groups of planes (A and B, we'll say) are in close proximity in the story (and only the filmmaker knows the full story, the viewers in the bleachers only know what the filmmaker reveals to them), then it helps the viewer to see the relative proximity of things on the screen. The way to do that is with shots that show both A and B in the same shot.

In the beginning, we had a bunch of shots of the Russians and Germans flying around, but there was no sense as to how close they were to each other once they got close. If you hadn't said in the titles that the Yaks were going after the 109's I wouldn't have known (although I might have guessed). But you don't want the audience to have to guess about stuff like that. Showing a pilot's POV (point of view) looking at the enemy or having an over-the-shoulder shot showing both A and B helps the viewer out a lot. Without knowing the proximity of the Russians and Germans, I have to admit that the opening shots started to drag a little bit for want of some sort of action. Viewer interest starts to lag fairly quickly if it just looks like we're watching a bunch of planes flying around with no particular purpose.


The opening shot with the titles was a touch long from 00:16 to 00:34. It was great as a backdrop for the titles, but after the titles disappeared, you might have shaved a couple seconds off the end. That's a very small niggle, but I'll throw it out there.

I recommend you work on capturing a variety of different camera angles. If you use the same views too much, the cinematography doesn't look as interesting and can even start to look boring. A frequent favorite camera view of new filmmakers is the flyby view. It's a great view, but don't abuse it. Look at the best films out there (a list can be found at Joe90's Flight Sim Movies"”see the link in my sig block) and see what camera angles other filmmakers have used. Be creative and try to come up with unique views that frame your subjects in interesting ways. Redundancy bores very quickly.

I say all of this because you made pretty heavy use of the flyby view. I think the flyby tends to work well as an intro shot or exit shot in a scene. For example, we see a bunch of close-ups and medium shots of some planes. You end that with a flyby and then we go to a different group of planes, maybe even a different scene (different location). Or you start out a scene with a flyby and then move to close-ups, to show more closely just who is in the group, etc. That's not to say you could never have a flyby in the middle of a scene. It could, for example, be used as sort of a pause from all of the close-ups and (if you have it) dialogue. Or it could be a wider establishing shot in the middle of a scene to help the viewer get reoriented in a furball fight. But again, it's just one shot of many that should be in your bag of tricks. Think ˜variety' when choosing camera angles.

Keep in mind what I'm saying here should not be interpreted as hard-and-fast rules, just guidelines. But try them out on your next film until you develop a better feel for where to insert flybys. Ultimately, cinematography and editing are almost entirely about feel, however, until you fully develop that sense, guidelines help.

00:57 to 01:20 is one very long 23-second shot. Better to break that up into a few smaller shots. A shot with no action that goes beyond about five seconds can start to look boring, and too much of that drags the entire story down with it. You want fresh views of the action on a regular basis to keep things interesting visually.

01:20 is a straight on flyby of the Yaks, but that's immediately followed up at 01:24 by a more or less straight-on shot of the 109's. It makes it a little confusing for the viewer as in the low light it looks a little like another view of the Yaks.

Assigning different directions of travel across the screen to different forces (A goes left to right, B goes right to left) helps the viewer recognize more quickly who is who and keep things sorted out in his head. 'You' know what's going on because you're the filmmaker, but you need to present things clearly for the viewer to follow along. Check out my tutorial on Directional Continuity at MrVH's site for more thoughts on that. You can find it here. There's actually a lot to that subject and it can get a little confusing sometimes trying to figure out which side of an object the camera should be on.

You have three flybys back to back to back at 01:45, 01:51 and 01:55. ˜Nuff said.

03:13 to 03:35 is one long shot of a bomber diving in. Not only is that shot too long, the viewer is denied seeing the action of the plane crashing. You've set up the crash and then pulled the rug out from under the viewer, which is frustrating as a viewer. Give the viewer the best seat in the house of all the best action in your virtual world. Try to anticipate what the viewer will want to see, and present that in the best view possible.

At 02:21, we see the 110's first attack on the bombers, guns blazing. We assume he hit his target, but we never see whether he does. Again, you denied the viewer a look at the best action in that part of the film. What the viewer wants and expects to see there is a shot of the cannons hitting (or missing) the bomber. It might help to think of this in terms of 'conflict' and 'resolution.' Don't forget to resolve the conflict you set up, unless you have a reason for not doing so.

At 05:30 you suddenly switched to an aged-film filter for no apparent reason. I assume this was an accident, but, again, watch your video carefully for stuff like that.

An element that this film's story lacked is the element of suspense. Suspense is created by putting characters (particularly characters the viewer cares about) in situations where they are in danger and the outcome is uncertain. There's very little of that here. You do have the Yaks going after the 109's, but honestly, I just assumed the 109's would outrun them and was never really worried about them once the 110 started its attack. Try to weave some uncertainty into your stories to make the viewer wonder what will happen to the hero. The back and forth uncertainty (think rollercoaster ride) is what makes films exciting and fun to watch. I covered ways to build suspense extensively in a critique of another film, which you can find here.

Again, I salute your efforts with this film and hope my comments don't discourage you as a filmmaker. Take what you agree with from my comments (I'm not the demi-god of filmmaking by any means) and incorporate it into your skills set. Throw away what you disagree with. And then keep on making films. That's the process to follow to improve at anything. Best of luck.

[Edited for typos, clarification and to add links.]

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