The Host Unknown

Far and away the most stylish school film of the heats so far. Beautifully shot, lovely pacing and a sophisticated edit. Phenomenal art direction, use of the drawing element, creative angles and lighting choices.

Excellent performances. Love the mumble-core-esque delivery which gave so much authenticity.

Extra commendation for playing your age!

My only nitpick would be that I'd have loved to have seen a bit more intensity in piano keys moment. Maybe a jauntier angle, deeper SFX, possibly ramping up the motion slighting to make it "hit harder" so to speak.

Overall an extremely well constructed film which absolutely plays to your strengths. I'm really looking forward with what you guys come up with in the future!

Beautifully shot film. Clear storyline with great shot selection made it truly immersive. Great performances all around. Highly recommend watching this one, keen as to see what films y'all churn out in the future. Huge props

A really great film, team. Sinister and unsettling in vibe as school mates discuss their mate who hasn't been in class for quite some time and the film unfolds as to why.

Stylistically fantastic. Your yellow saturations clearly felt like a nod to BACKROOMS and yet your creepy drawing was the stuff of nightmares straight out of SINISTER or the BABADOOK.

Using split screen to mix things up was a bold but sure handed choice and it genuinely felt like there was a deft hand directing this film. I think your pacing and edit was fantastic.

To elevate the film a bit more I would suggest honing in on a your central protagonist and looking for more emotional impact for whatever you shoot next. Just my 2c but you also have a strong voice so keep up the good work!

Oh this film was wonderful. Excellent building of suspense. Great puppetry. Chilling portrait reveal. Cool idea to include a Zoom recording as part of your found footage. You're really good at implying rather than showing, which forces the audience to imagine an incredibly gruesome scene for themselves. Excellent foreshadowing and jumping through time – a great way to mess with the audience. The bookending of the distinctive yellow puffer jacket and the callback of "Why am I on a Zoom call?" were really effective. I loved the range of feelings this film instilled in me due to the nuanced performances and skilled filmmaking.

Tautoko Chester's suggestion to think about how you could make the closing shot hit harder. You've clearly got it in you given how much tension you built with your deliberate cuts through the rest of the film. I know it's hard to get all the shots and edits perfect when you've only got 48 hours.

I find myself wondering if the difference between a colon in one security camera timestamp and semicolon in another was deliberate or accidental. Not that it matters.

A genuinely good horror film

Great technical strengths in this team. There is real vision here! And we're very glad you found a way to justify the found footage genre with a unique sort of paranoia for one of your characters, that's a good way to navigate getting multiple angles without it seeming out of the genres scope. I'll be honest though, this did take a couple of watches to get my head around - not so much the timey wimey stuff, but just the relationship between the characters, and the stakes of their peral. A few teenage boys having a chat in odd looking rooms, all with a similar sort of monotone expression and delivery of lines, made following this story quite hard. I don't really have a satisfying solution for how this can be resolved. It's not as simple as 'act your age' because you're not doing anything particularly adult like, I guess I'm just not that convinced that a bunch of teenagers would be getting on a serious zoom call to discuss missing people and paranoia, I'd expect to see some minecraft or something ya know?

THE BEST THING: The twistyness of this one shows some real depth of thinking, cool to see from a young team.

THE NEXT THING: Take you technical prowess and bolt it to a clearer tale and you'll absolutely soar in this comp. Very much looking forward to seeing future films from this talented team!

In a year of pretty bog-standard found footages, your take on it took me by surprise. Not sure if you guys have seen the endlessly memed Unfriended film but this holds a somewhat similar premise of a found footage using a video call, which I'm surprised didn't get super popular during COVID lockdowns but that's besides the point. I liked the in-universe excuse for having multiple angles (like the final fight of Chronicle, okay I'll stop with the references).

The monster hand looked genuinely so good, it got me wondering if you guys just had that lying around somewhere or if you bought it specifically for the festival.

You guys pulled of your premise with such unwavering confidence that my only real suggestion would be that the plot was a little confusing. Other than that, bravo team!