Decision day

When a guy wins $4000 in Lotto he faces pressure from his girlfriend to spend it on him. Serious or a comedy? I was a bit unsure at points. The cafe scenes were a bit noisy and it got a bit disjointed overall which can happen when you are creating different time-lines.

I think this was quite creative and I thought the use of the green screen was interesting. There was a key element that I think left the whole film a little stuck - WHY was the day looping the way it was? did the character know about this? what influenced his decision in the final scene? These questions probably needed to be answered for the film to be fully whole.

For a second during your film i was hoping it was going to take a silly turn by just having him loop forever and ever and ever and ever and ever... and ever... That would have pushed it past boring and back into 48hours insanity. Nice concept but it fell a bit flat due to repetition.

Another attempt at a Groundhog Day style time loop that really falls flat because the exact same action is repeated over and over with no increase in pace. Seriously, go watch Groundhog Day, or Edge of Tommorrow. You’ll notice that certain events are skipped or shortened each loop, which really helps to keep the audiences attention. The last thing the audience wants is to see the same or similar looking footage without a decent reason for it to be there. I hope I’m not misremembering your film and you actually did quicken the pace, but if you did, I definitely still felt it could’ve been even quicker, as I lost interest not too far into the first loop - probably because your film is missing another hugely key aspect to making a Groundhog Day style film, and that is that your character should know that they are in a time loop. Without that, we are essentially watching the same events occur over and over again, with little change, and we are not taking a journey with a character. Without the character being aware of the loop, he has no reason to make a single change to his life, and any changes that happen are left to pure chance. I feel like the message you were trying to send was not that if you randomly don’t hit your head on the cupboard in the morning, you’ll be wiser with your money and relationships, but that’s essentially what happened. Now, going by the weird and visually confusing key effect you had going on, it looked like the man saw himself being argued with, but then after that point it was very unclear whether he stepped into that loop or was just watching the loop play out. If your character was supposed to be aware of the loop, there was certainly no reaction on his face communicating that to us. Now I realise this review may sound fairly negative, but I wouldn’t write such a long review just because I don’t like a film. It’s because I see a lot of potential in your team, to tell intriguing stories and send some thought provoking messages. What you really need to work on is the structure of your story and your visual communication, as well as thinking about what you can do in the editing to help further your storytelling (eg. quickening the pace of each time loop). Unfortunately this film is a just a notch below last year’s effort, but I hope to see you in the competition again next year.

I agree with Kawiti, I think there's an insane idea in this film of just repeating the same sequences over and over again ad nauseam. As it stands, I think while there are clearly a lot of creative minds at work here, we fall into repetitiveness, with some strange green screen work and dull locations. I'm not sure I quite picked up the story either, so my advice would be to work on making sure what's happening in your film is clear. As for your title, not sure how "Decision Day" factors in.

I think they struck upon a strong idea here but It wasn't executed quite as well as perhaps it could have been. A couple gets into an argument and then the guy gets stuck in a sort of time loop repeating his mistake over and over again. It's not entirely clear why he gets stuck in the time loop. I assumed it was something to do with hitting his head on the cupboard but it's never really explained so far as I can tell. I'd say the films biggest downfall is the lack of character progression, if he notices his time loop it's in technical details like not accidentally standing in that puddle anymore rather then going through a more emotional journey that would have given the ending the payoff it deserves.