Music To Die For

This reminded me of Tarantino's short "My Best Friend's Birthday" from a narrative place!

Next year, I think some really dynamic camera work would sell it!

Own a CD at your peril!

This film runs with a fun concept, and the final gag was especially funny – although far from the only misfortunate pedestrian in this year's competition.

It was great to see an action/adventure film with some actual fight scenes! Not all this year's action/adventure films managed that.

I struggled to follow the finer details of the plot. This could have been fixed with clearer audio, close-up shots of people talking, and more commitment to character when delivering the key lines that revealed important plot points.

It's hard if your team can't get your hands on dedicated audio equipment, but you can also achieve crisp, high-quality audio by having the camera or phone close to your actor for close-up dialogue shots. For example, the dialogue while the cards were being flipped onto the table was really easy to understand.

The dying-and-then-waking-up trope would be more effective with tighter/snappier editing and louder sound effects (e.g. gunshot, gasping upon waking up).

Great work with the visual effects for the sword. It's nice to see that kind of ambition in the competition. Also I liked the artistic choice to make certain scenes black and white.

These school teams sure know how to make a millennial feel old! I'm pretty sure that's actually a Panasonic Blu Ray player?

"let's see how many different ways we can kill our friend" is probably one of the best ideas you can have on a Friday night so I feel like you guys would've had a lot of fun making this. Some truly inspired sequences (big ups to the energy sword) and a real hoot the whole way through! Ka rawe team

Guys, this film made no sense hahahahahaha.

However! Still a significant step up from Will and team from both a technical and storytelling perspective compared to last year. We want you guys to keep returning and competing, so here are some thoughts on the next things to crank it up a notch.

Show vs. tell! A group of boys sitting around a table talking about this dystopian world where CDs are a rare commodity wasn’t particularly convincing from that one master shot.

Why does this dude keep dying!? We’ve watched this five times now and we’re still completely lost.

Random car accident at the end. Lol — we’re gonna go out on a limb here and say this probably happened because you didn’t know how to end your film, or ran out of time to end it the way you wanted to.

THE BEST THING: A great technical leap forward for this team.
THE NEXT THING: Story is king! Makes sure the film makes sense haha.