Hollow Point

Jass Films · Post by **Jass Films** » Sun Apr 10, 2005 2:08 pm

I downloaded it alright from my AUS Mac... My AUS Mac supports it...

fi11m-m4k3r · Post by **fi11m-m4k3r** » Sun Apr 10, 2005 2:13 pm

"Jesus.. headshot! that's nasty"
Who would say that when your buddy gets shot?

crb · Post by **crb** » Sun Apr 10, 2005 2:29 pm

The only thing negative that I have is that I didn't like the music. I liked how you shot the chase sequences with the cars, I liked the fast pace of the film. I really like the helicopter shot. how did you do that, real, model or cg? the inside of the helicopter though was missing something to give it autheticity.... was that all cg?

Passit · Post by **Passit** » Sun Apr 10, 2005 2:30 pm

when i clicked on download it just opened a link to the homepage ?

Mr.Tom · Post by **Mr.Tom** » Sun Apr 10, 2005 4:08 pm

yeah, same with me.

Adam · Post by **Adam** » Sun Apr 10, 2005 5:01 pm

Please be patient with us as the correct render will be up soon. When the <Broken Link> text is gone then it will work.

Post by **Matt** » Sun Apr 10, 2005 5:02 pm

Thanks for all the comments. I don't think I can disagree with anything that has been said. Constructive critism taken on board

Render Error - The DVD is fine. For some reason I lost the link to one of the explosions when I rendered the WMV files. The files have now been fixed and replaced.

Music - The music is original in the sense that I created it all using eJay 360 Xtreme. It isn't as good as using commercial music but we wanted it to be 100 percent our own work ... for better or for worse. Appart from the odd sound effect and explosion stuff HP is original.

Helicopter - The external helicopter was filmed at the Fairford Airshow which I visited a few years ago. It was a British Army Gazelle. The internal was all CG as you might have noticed ... it did lack something. I tried various camera shakes on it but never quite got it to look how I originally planned. The helicopter scene was really put there to try and explain how the cops caught up with terrorists given they had a head start after the brick incident.

Dialogue - We are cr** at writing dialogue. Some of the dialogue was adlibbed. I think this dialogue is more natural. Some of it isn't very realistic I will agree! It is not easy writing down spoken english.

Script - The weaknesses in the script are due to a number of factors. Firstly we aren't script writers

The second one was the fact that the story evolved in a number of different ways as we refined it. Certain plot elements got elaborated while others became less important. Originally we were going to focus on a simple kidnapping and make the film 5 minutes long. After a number of "wouldn't it be cool if we did a scene where X Y X happens" moments the script ballooned in size and we had shoehorned in a few extra chunks of plot. As with may amateur films it is hard to create a script without merely thinking of cool scenes and then artificially linking them together. Hollywood does it though

I was pleased that the rewind seemed to work. When you've seen the footage so many times it is almost impossible to guess how a fresh audience might understand the story.

CG - Obviously we tried various bits of CG. I agree that CG does make amateur films look 'amateur' but this is where we tend to think 'what the hell'. Its fun to mess around with so we did. Some of it looks a bit poor some of it works really well. The all the bombcounter stuff was CG. So was the brief glipse of car speedometer. I think these bits of CG worked great and not many people really noticed they weren't real. I also like the 'MTL' poster I inserted on the wall of the car park. The explosion is weak and the various bit of blood don't work very well.

Acting - We can't act. However the acting was an improvement over MTL. I'm still a bit wooden but I was very pleased with Oliver(The Boss) and Kuhan(The Police Chief) aka Siv.

Sound - The sound seemed better during editing and watching on the TV. When we watched the film at the premiere on the cinema screen certain imperfections became a bit more obvious. The wind noise was one of them. We were aware of the wind noise but it didn't seem that bad. It varies depending on the volume and encoding I think. There are a few 'clicks' in places I didn't notice on the hundreds of views we had during editing. Oh well. In future we are going to make more use of external mics.

Overall we are pleased with it. It built on MTL and the mistakes we made in this one are slightly more subtle than in MTL. This fits in with our attitude of making films where we can have a laugh in the process but improve on the previous one. We were also attempting some stuff for the first time such as the car mount and planned CG. None of the effects in MTL were ever planned because when we actually filmed MTL we didn't know we would be editing it on the PC. With Hollow Point we knew this would be the case so we knew roughly what scenes depended on us doing CG.

I'll write a Premiere report soon with some photos from the big night.

Truggy · Post by **Truggy** » Sun Apr 10, 2005 7:01 pm

downloading 25%

Clarence · Post by **Clarence** » Sun Apr 10, 2005 9:27 pm

OOH! It's working now, downloading 2 min. remaining. Can't wait.

Jass Films · Post by **Jass Films** » Sun Apr 10, 2005 9:32 pm

Matt wrote:Sound - The sound seemed better during editing and watching on the TV. When we watched the film at the premiere on the cinema screen certain imperfections became a bit more obvious. The wind noise was one of them. We were aware of the wind noise but it didn't seem that bad. It varies depending on the volume and encoding I think. There are a few 'clicks' in places I didn't notice on the hundreds of views we had during editing. Oh well. In future we are going to make more use of external mics.

It may be handy to have a really good pair of speakers, or do what I do, Plug your computer sound into the stereo. This means you will find where a lot of these imperfections are in the first edit. Sound is an important part of film making, some say the visuals are not complete without good sound. And it is something that you (and I) need to work on so that we can complete our visuals, and have the films to the standard that we wish them to be.

Dialogue - We are cr** at writing dialogue. Some of the dialogue was adlibbed. I think this dialogue is more natural. Some of it isn't very realistic I will agree! It is not easy writing down spoken english.

Don't try and script spoken english. you need to script thing pretty much artificial to what would happen in life, yet seems real to the audience. It' like when an actor stuffs up a line, even though they could possibly speak like that in real life, the audience will still get disconnected and go "ahaha, stuff up". Steer away from "Natural" dialogue, watch lots of TV and movies, study how there dialogue, and you should be able to grab peoples attention a lot better.

Just a few helpful hints I have learnt myself

PyroWill · Post by **PyroWill** » Sun Apr 10, 2005 9:34 pm

Good effort mate

crb · Post by **crb** » Mon Apr 11, 2005 1:00 am

I found with my experience with dialogue that I would write a line, but then pick an actor to fit the part, and then they would change the way the line was said a bit so that it felt right to them. Sometimes I would be picky about certain lines.
If you want to improve dialogue, do what I did back with I was 15-16 years old. My English teachers were getting us into poetry. Shakespeare, Longfellow, Frost, etc. Not saying you need to talk like Shakespeare, but he was choosey about his words. I started mimicing his lines, or coming up with my own poety. Went through like 20 poems, must garbage, but it got me to think more choosey about words. Then when I wrote "amnesia" about 3 or more years ago and went through about 13-14 drafts, the dialogue became very well and I came up with lines like "if you saw the truth face to face it would shock you", etc. And every line became very loaded. I also cut things down so that most of the time the charecters would only say important lines. Film is not reality, it is surreal. It's life that is hyped. So in that sense, yes, in real life most of what we say is pointless babble. But you wouldn't watch 30minutes to 120 minutes of mostly babble. You want something larger than life or it isn't worth your time. So every line is important. Also, I found if all I could say was a cheesy line, then I had the charecter say nothing and do. They always say, show a story don't tell a story and that film is a story in pictures, so in that sense if I can't come up with a good line, I try to show what I want to say.

maj_barnes · Post by **maj_barnes** » Mon Apr 11, 2005 1:18 am

I just got finished watching it; and...

I love it, the twist at the end, or in the middle, or whenever he shoots the two "terrorists" was very, uh, twisty.

The blood looked pretty good, except for it came out in a stream and not a spray (the splatter on the walls was very nice, except no chunks, how could you?!). Also, I was wondering, where the police using hollow points, or is that just a cool title?

Spike_P_2 · Post by **Spike_P_2** » Mon Apr 11, 2005 1:37 am

I LOVED IT MATT!!!!!!!! IVE WATCHED IT LEAST 12 TIMES NOW, LOL. I wish i was that good at film making. ANd dont feel bad about ur acting abilities, I am no better at it, did u even see my films? I was so corny about my lines. BUt i am gonna play much more serious roles in the next short i film and the next two films i make.

Truggy · Post by **Truggy** » Mon Apr 11, 2005 5:47 am

See the movie ended, and i was expspecting an explosion.....well anyway very nice matt.

Adam · Post by **Adam** » Mon Apr 11, 2005 6:16 am

Truggy wrote:See the movie ended, and i was expspecting an explosion.....well anyway very nice matt.

There is a version with an explosion but it was cgi and even we could see that it wasn't going to look relastic especially as the final shot of the film. The explosion version as well as lots of other things are avaliable on the DVD.

WeirdEars · Post by **WeirdEars** » Mon Apr 11, 2005 11:07 am

Download module.php, a 57mb file and rename it 'Hollowpoint.wmv'. It should work...

Passit · Post by **Passit** » Mon Apr 11, 2005 7:05 pm

That was entertaining - liked it!

its a fun little action flick and i liked some of the comedy elements.

Good job!

chewie · Post by **chewie** » Mon Apr 11, 2005 11:48 pm

It was pretty cool, but it was to confusing. I thought the action stuff was narly, but kinda weird how it all of the sudden rewinds.

Jason · Post by **Jason** » Tue Apr 12, 2005 5:25 am

This fits in with our attitude of making films where we can have a laugh in the process but improve on the previous one.

Amen.

Ornsack · Post by **Ornsack** » Tue Apr 12, 2005 2:45 pm

Ah I love it, it's great! Finally got around to seeing it and it's everything I expected it to be! I still can't get over how grown up everyone is in it compared to the last films! Ha ha!

Nice to see someone get something done on here too

Also nice to see loads of it shot in my neck of the woods, especially the opening driving sequence

Great stuff, will prob watch it again before the day's through

CaptainAmerica · Post by **CaptainAmerica** » Tue Apr 12, 2005 7:31 pm

I love this movie it was good! One thing I didn't get to see the end but I will. But good job Loved it.

Post by **Matt** » Tue Apr 12, 2005 8:36 pm

When we came to sort out the ending we had a few issues. Originally the idea was to show the car exploding. Thats what everyone was expecting right? But we thought that seeing the explosion would be a bit to final. So we decided on the white out. We tried the white out with an explosion but decided a white out with silence said it all. We all know what happened but you don't actually see the car explode. Maybe the bomb was dud? Maybe The Boss is thrown from the wreckage to live another day?

The car speedo effect was inspired by Ornsack's early work

Between us we have brought destruction and chaos to the centre of Bristol !!

Truggy · Post by **Truggy** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 4:41 pm

We all know what happened but you don't actually see the car explode. Maybe the bomb was dud? Maybe The Boss is thrown from the wreckage to live another day?

another film?

Post by **Matt** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 6:45 pm

In ten years time

Although maybe we could do a short film just focusing on the Boss and Weasle on previous jobs.

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Hollow Point

Solving the module.php problem