FEEDBACK SAMPLE
"The Twickenham Murders"
The director of The Twickenham Murders wanted to receive honest feedback for his independent short film.
You can watch the film below and read a sample of the feedback the filmmaker received below, or you can read the feedback in Excel.
FEEDBACK #4
Age - 22
Gender - Male
Profession - Teacher
Did you like the film?
Sort of
Anything you'd like more of?
I think this film has great foundations. I’ve watched hundreds of films made by people older than you who didn’t have such a clear grasp of the basics. Effectively what I would want from this film is just more everything. Both behind the camera stuff and from the acting. But that will come in time, after many other films, when you’ve got a lot more experience and money under your belt. As it stands, you’re doing just fine as you are. Though, acting-wise, you could definitely do with loosening up a bit. When you’re working mostly with straight-on, one angle shots, it can already make the characters feel a bit like they’re on a stage so, it’s good to try to think of ways to express distrust and anxiety in more dynamic ways. Otherwise, it all ends up feeling a bit nailed down to the floor.
But to make sure this answer isn’t a complete cop-out. From the film’s story, the thing I was missing most is a sense of backstory. From Oliver, especially but also Clyde. We don’t know anything about either of them. We don’t know how long Oliver’s been taking (or not taking) his pills or what they were for. If he’s been prescribed pills, is there a doctor checking in on him? Does he live with anyone? The film is well-paced and you don’t need to slow it down by having Oliver give us a whole “Hi. My name is…” monologue. But that’s where set design can come in. You know, a simple picture of Oliver and Clyde hanging out on Oliver or Clyde’s desk would tell us that they used to be friends once. When you’re writing characters, you don’t need to fill out a whole sheet about their favourite colour and food or anything but it’s always a good idea to have those key questions in mind and find ways to tell them to your audience.
Were there any moments/scenes you particularly liked? (Please list and explain)
First thing that comes to mind is that jump scare. You got me pretty good with it, even knowing it was coming. Really well-executed without going over the top with it.
The final shot where you deliver your twist and show off that hole in Oliver’s shirt was excellently done. The timing, as the camera pans out, for that reveal is perfect. And I also have to give you credit for not drawing attention to Oliver’s back during that sequence. When you’ve got something you can’t show, it can completely make you question how you’re going to shoot, so I was glad to go back and see that you treated it so casually.
In general, I want to give you a lot of credit for your cinematography. More specifically, the way you use lighting and colour. You don’t go extreme with it but with a limited budget, that’s by far my preference. You did a lot with what you had and I think you got some brilliant shots for your effort.
Were there any moments/scenes you particularly disliked, or felt didn't work? (Please list and explain)
So, I think my biggest problem with the film is that it can stray into feeling goofy but these moments never feel deliberate enough that that’s the tone you’re actually going for. And because of that, there’s a bit of tonal whiplash at places.
This is mostly a problem through the dialogue. In your film you’ve got lines like “This time, I knew there was cause for concern.” “Don’t be foolish.” “We both know what really happened out there.” Lines like this kind of remind me of an oldschool noir. And with that, I mean that they sound cliché and too old for these young characters to be speaking. If your film really went there with the noir asthetic or was more of a clear parody, I’d let you off with lines like this. All in all, I just think you could probably do better. Dialogue is tough. Trust me, I know. It’s honestly a lot better when you don’t try to force it. Easier said than done when you’re doing a horror/murder mystery but just be a bit more mindful when you’re writing. You’ve got the benefit of acting in your films. If it doesn’t feel natural when it comes out of your mouth, try again until it does.
There’s also the moment at 07:55 where Oliver steps back into the fence to avoid being followed. It felt pretty awkward to me. You could have really played up the silliness of it and it would have worked as a moment of brevity. But since your film is quite serious, a moment like that just kind of exposes your limitations in what you could do with that location. Never something you want to do. And it doesn’t help when the very next scene shows Clyde looking shocked to see Oliver at the park. The way that transition is set up, it makes it feel that the path they were just on leads directly to the park. So it felt pretty weird when Clyde is shocked to see that Oliver has walked up the path (or so it appeared).
Were there any moments you felt annoyed or frustrated by the movie? (Please list and explain)
This film has really excellent cinematography on still shots. So it was a little annoying in the couple of instances where you’re doing a tracking shot (and it’s clearly handheld) and the camera is shaking a lot. If this wasn’t intentional, there are a bunch of ways to soften the extent that shaking effects your footage. I’m assuming you know about stablising software and tools in your video editor. In which case, there are cheap grips and tutorials online that can help you hold your camera more steady as you’re moving.
If this was intentional, I don’t think it worked. With the dual spying aspect of your film, you had a perfect chance to use shaky cam effectively (making it look the shot was from the perspective of another person) but that would involve a shot from further back. And for the shots to be realistically from either Oliver or Clyde’s perspective.
Were you confused at any given time? (Please list and explain)
So on my first watch, I was definitely confused as to why Oliver was going to bed fully clothed. I also completely missed how his T-shirt was changing. Caught it on the second and realised we only ever see him waking up fully clothed. So clearly he had gotten undressed and dressed again before waking up in the morning. Well done for coming up with that. It was a cool detail once I realised it wasn’t a weird costume choice.
I will still say that the way it’s presented is still a bit weird. I think if you had included one shot where we physically see Oliver work well into the night and fall asleep at his desk in his clothes, it would have worked better. Or at least, it would have been more believable as to why he was wearing his clothes in bed. But that confusion convinced me to go in for a second viewing and really, anything that can’t be so bad.
That said, for the sake of this leading into your final twists, I do think a few things hurt its effectiveness.
The first is that during that first night, Oliver wakes up with a new T-shirt at only around 2:40am. I’m a total night owl so that doesn’t seem that late to me. At least, it seems pretty early for Oliver to have gone to bed, changed clothes, murdered someone and then gotten back into bed. Since we never get a time of death in the radio reports, there’s nothing we can use, as the audience, to try to put the clues together.
The second is that with Clyde is wearing the exact same clothes whenever we see him. Not even a change in T-shirt, or at least it doesn’t look like it. That, more than anything, made me think this was a case of just not having brought different outfits for the shoot. I understand not wanting to draw too much attention to your clues, but in this case, I think you might have made it a bit too difficult for your audience to actually notice your clues at all. And that’s no fun in a mystery.
How would you rate the following elements? (1 to 5)
Please explain your rating.
The Beginning
3/5
Reason
Right, so all in all, you have some beautiful shots going on in the beginning of the film. It’s unfortunately let down a bit by the limitations of your location but hey, what can you do? Hard to take over a public park. I think you do pretty good work with what you had at hand. And I’ll get to pace later, but you’ve got a really solid grasp of your story beats. It has that noir style of the detective visiting the scene of the crime, immediately finding the small clues that the cops missed. That part of it works well.
However, I think this is also where your dialogue is the most clunky and unnatural sounding. This would also be your moment to give us our first insights into Oliver and we never really get that. There’s also never a big pay off to what he’s writing in his notebook at this point. It’s a nice little visual note to the film but little else. Although you set up that piece of fabric well, I think it was a missed opportunity not to use the notebook in some larger way. We’ll later see Oliver writing up his points of the day, which made me wonder what he had been writing before that. It might have been a bit of a cliché in itself, but I’m always up for a notebook revealling the inner twisted thoughts of the person who wrote in it. Having the notebook show Oliver’s dual nature in some way is one potential payoff but there were definitely other avenues. Just remember that the things you show in the beginning of your film are the parts that stay with the audience the longest, so they grow attached and want some kind of resolution from all aspects of your beginning.
The Ending
4/5
Reason
It’s a solid twist and a really excellent way to reveal the twist. In general, the whole sequence of Oliver entering Clyde’s house feels suitably “endgame” ominous. Big credit to the music there but also the editing. That feeling is a difficult one to pull off and so I really can’t give it lower than a 4 for that reason.
But (and at this point, you know there’s always a but), this might be the point in the film where I found your cinematography to be the least effective. There’s very few shots of the room as a whole and this is a scenario where I could feel you hiding. The camera work here isn’t telling me “Look at this.” it’s telling me “Don’t look over there. That part’s not right.” Maybe I’m wrong but that’s the sense it gave me. The close-ups here didn’t do you many favours. Normally close-ups are a great way to show intensity and being overwhelmed. Doesn’t land here. And if you look at your shots at Oliver here, I can tell you why. Oliver is shot very straight-on here. Or, whilst walking down the stairs, he’s shot from below. When you want to show your character’s fear and how the pressure is getting to them, you want to make them feel small and so you shoot from higher angles. The straight-on shots don’t add anything to the mood of this sequence.
I also found myself missing Clyde’s presence. I wasn’t expecting a corpse but the film ends and we don’t know what’s happened to Clyde’s body. It’s not in his house so we have to assume it’s in the lake but we’re not told either way. And you have a perfect way to present that information with the cop on the phone. He could have thrown in “Oh, we’re getting reports we’ve just found a third body.” before saying that officers will be arriving to the house. That would have tied the bow on the film just a bit tighter for me. But I’m nitpicking at this point.
The Music
5/5
Reason
The music’s excellent. Every choice fits very well to the assigned scene and does a brilliant job of adding to the mood of the scene as well. They’re all edited together very nicely. That’s rarer than you might think for an indie film, even one with a higher budget, so I always love to see it.
Especially the song playing over the ending credits. It’s an awesome song and it basks in the glory of your big reveal, which adds to it all the more. The one song managaes to capture the tone of the whole film and that’s exactly what the end credits song should do. Great stuff all round.
The Pace
4/5
Reason
The pace is solid. It shows that you had a clear idea of your story beats. Logistically, I still question the amount of time that passes within the film but the breaks that the day and night cycle gives us washed over well with me. I didn’t get a sense that the film was starting and stopping too much so that’s all good.
Now, in another film, I would probably criticise you for not making enough use of your rising action. And I’m still tempted to say you could have pushed more on Oliver and Clyde’s interactions. I would have loved to see more tension from the two of them. But, I also think because you didn’t have Clyde and Oliver get into a proper fight or argument, it made the sequence of Oliver going into Clyde’s house more aloof and mysterious. It wasn’t instantly clear how you were going to handle it because if they had been fighting and the next day, Clyde’s door was open, it would have been obvious. So you were right to handle it as you did for the sake of adding more intrigue.
The Story
3/5
Reason
The basis for the story is great. I got really excited when reading the synopsis and if you can manage that, you’re already well on your way. Having two people both investigating, thinking that the other is the culprit was definitely enough of a twist on a classic tale to keep me invested.
There’s some wasted potential in the character department though. You treat the story as though it’s plot driven. But really a story like this is better when it’s character driven. For the sake of most detective stories, because the protagonists are detectives, you already know why they’re involved so the main reason to get to the end is just to find out who killed the victim and how.
For a story like yours, with a more unlikely protagonist, the audience wants to know why they’re involved and what they’ll discover about themselves, just as much as they want to know who did it.
The Drama
3/5
Reason
The drama runs parallel to the story here. It’s all drama so there’s not much to add here.
Yeah, as I’ve said, it would have been nice to see more tension between Oliver and Clyde. But for one, there’s only so much you can get done in 14 minutes and for another, I do genuinely think it kind of worked out for you in the end. The lack of a clear antagonist gives the film a bit of an unsettling feel to it. Clyde never comes across as evil enough for us to 100% assume that he’s the bad guy. That keeps the whole thing open ended which really works a credit to your film in the end.
The Characters
3/5
Reason
The conflict and awkward nature between Oliver and Clyde’s relationship showed an interesting dynamic as Clyde teases Oliver whilst Oliver remains reserved and uncommunicative. They both remain suspicious of one another, but Clyde is more subtle in his approach. Although Oliver can seem a bit flat at times, his character is interesting and I wanted to know more about his psychological state.
Any other comments or feelings about the film?
I went onto your YouTube page and it looks like this is the most ambitious film you’ve done thus far, so I just want to say well done for pushing yourself and what you got out of it. It’s a great step in getting to wherever you’re planning to go.
Also, don’t take anything I say as gospel. This feedback is meant to just give you one opinionated person’s perspective and make you think. Find what stands out to you amongst all this feedback and just try new things. I do hope that it’s been helpful and you get a lot out of it though.use at night did make me jump.