ASK & DISCUSS INDEX

12 years, 5 months ago - Gerry Byron

So, to sum up all of the above, student films are full of sh*t... Go make it anyway, it's a learning experience. Just don't expect anyone to watch it.

12 years, 5 months ago - SP User

check out the book 'how not to make a short film'

12 years, 6 months ago - Marcus Massey

"down-and-outs with wisdom to dispense" and "confessional priests"...
Brilliant! Made me laugh.

12 years, 5 months ago - Richard Conolly

Anything where the protagonist turns out to be insane and/or the whole thing turns out to be a dream.

12 years, 5 months ago - Joshua Westbury

Inappropriate/over use of focus pull.

12 years, 5 months ago - Gareth Bennett-Ryan

Scripts that are wildly ambitious and completely in-practical on the budget they have. Huge crowd scenes that they can never find enough extras for. Encouraging (or 'directing' if you like) the actors to over act everything because they don't know what good acting looks like and haven't learned the word 'subtle' yet. Unprofessional and overly demanding casting breakdowns.


I wasn't born this cynical, doing a handful of student films made me this way ;-)

12 years, 6 months ago - Euroscript Screenwriters

Long sequences of people walking in and out of rooms.

Long pauses

Long anything!

An assumption that we should care about some slacker who is supposed to be charming while feckless and probably stoned.

Camera work that looks as if the entire crew is stoned.

Awful sound, which luckily masks much of the...

Leaden dialogue filled with exposition.

Music that doesn't fit and always ends too early or too late.

A story that isn't a story but is a series of actions.

Uninteresting locations uninterestingly lit.

And after all that, a credit roller that's longer than Star Wars.

Am I cynical? Have I sat through too many of these?

Charles

12 years, 5 months ago - Ariel Podreider Lenzi

corny romatic/love boy get girl/loses her/get her again stories or any other lazy proposition of the hero's journey

12 years, 5 months ago - David Brown

Has anyone noticed that there is always just one person being killed in a bathtub in films? Why can't there be a scene where someone goes into a football club and then kills all the team while they sit in their team bath - that would be different! Just think of the carnage and the technical demands to pull off a scene like that.

12 years, 5 months ago - Dominic Burke

A common theme on casting calls is the demand that an actor "MUST be able to convey emotions like sadness, joy, etc". Um... yes that's what actors do! But to extend the attitude during a shoot by simply demanding an 'emotion' here and there will lead to forced or 'pushed' acting. You need to help give good reasons for things to happen, not just demand they happen in isolation. Yes this is the actors job, but them you must either give him/her some space to concentrate on their reasons, or help them with these reasons, -if you want a better film.

12 years, 5 months ago - Vasco de Sousa

Two things about student films can make them difficult to watch. One, they often end up being spoofs, with references to other movies or to student life, rather than having original stories.

Secondly, they are often a bunch of ideas thrown together, rather than the thoughts of one writer.

12 years, 5 months ago - David Kline

Everyone seems to have covered the main cliches or errors, but how about supposedly 'Dead characters' still moving/breathing/eyes moving under closed lids. Most student films seem to involve knives/guns/drugs/hoodies/gangs. Then there is a character in some sort of jeopardy and they wake up / it's all been a dream. Poor lighting/poor framing and awful composition/dreadful sound plus a reluctance to use close-ups (everything shot long or medium). Finally continuity errors/crap make-up e.g. Blood that looks like ketchup and poorly blocked and badly rehearsed fight scenes (always look too slow on camera) There you go, hope that helps.

12 years, 5 months ago - Sam Seal

They all have to be about life and death. No college kid seems to be interested in the small story well told.

12 years, 5 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin

Guns. Guns are lazy drama.

12 years, 6 months ago - Graham Bowe

I know film makers have to learn must most actors just don't have 1-2 weeks of free time to help them with their movie. Shorter time demands would help.
As to the cliche problems: basic technical ineptitude got to me on one particular shoot. I refused all further offers from a certain university after I was filmed in discussion on a bus, the director not realising that the noise of the bus engine would drown any dialogue. They had left no time to re-record the dialogue. I concluded they were not a serious school.
Also, as an older actor I have lost count of the number of down-and-outs with wisdom to dispense that I have been offered. These and confessional priests. Older people do have lives of their own and its not always about dying. Lighten up, folks!

12 years, 6 months ago - Marilyn Ann Bird

Hmm - all-male casts, an 18-24 year-old woman who has to get naked and edits that show the moment before the actors start acting all seem fairly prevalent.

12 years, 5 months ago - Sam Seal

Also - "bad acting", if you're going to pastiche it, invariably stems from lousy writing. It's scenes that are un-actable that make for bad acting.

12 years, 6 months ago - Cameron Phillips

During my first year at art college in 1999 the two big movies were The Matrix and Fight Club. Every script anybody in the class produced was either some sci-fi epic which they expected to film on a budget of a tenner or had a main character who turned out to be a figment of somebody's imagination in the story.

And no, I was no exception.

12 years, 6 months ago - Shoaib Vali

Dark comedy, to the point that its inapporpriate and way beyond decency, in the hope that even frankie boyle would feel uncomformtable, students films can get away with that. A comedy about drunk students calling a milf escort to their flat, only to realise that she's one of the student's mum, ofcourse the funny bits starts after it's a little too late.

post-sex cigarette anyone? mum?

12 years, 6 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin

In honesty I'm not sure I fully understand the question, but the length of student films is a common bugbear - at the expense of pace! As most shorts only tackle a single story unlike a feature film or tv drama, they have a natural length of much less than the same storyline in one of those formats as it has nothing to mirror or bounce off. However, the edits are not as ruthless as they could be, so shorts tend to be far too long for their own good.

Also, shorts where the credits make up 40% of the film. Nobody cares! Tv credits are gone in 30seconds, movie credits maybe 3 mins, but they have thousands of names. A student film with a 30 sec opening credit (every order line being 'a Joe bloggs film/ written by Joe bloggs/ starring Joe bloggs/ with Jenny Bloggs / introducing Mary Bloggs'), then 4 minutes of content and another 3 minutes of end rollers is just unfair to the audience!