Ok, I've finally had a chance to sit down and think about this. I have lots of strong feelings about this series, both good and bad. I'll start with the good.
Things that I think are Excellent:
-The wardrobe
-The casting
-Accuracy of the mood/look for the time period
Things that I think are very good:
-The lighting
-The staging
And now to the stuff that I think need work and could have been better.
I see this very much as a storyboard, which I assume is kind of what you had in mind. The problem is that it is very difficult to have a storyboard that accurately and completely tells a story. And that isn't really the point of a storyboard. In film, storyboard are menat to accompany a script. The script tells the story, and the storyboard adds visuals. In a comic book, the frames are always accompanied by dialogue or narrative text. In either case, the images don't really stand alone, and need to be accompanied by the script or text to effectively tell the story. So, in this format, it's leaves a lot untold. This can work, but I think it just really hard to present a story in a way that leaves the viewers ok with not knowing everything.
There were also come continuity issues, and therefore, lack of flow. Like you've got a beautiful women in a dress in a bed, then you've got a differently lit, beautiful woman in lingerie in a bed with a guy. It took me a while to figure out that those were the same woman. Then I notice that she was also in the frame before at the show. But none of this was obvious enough to just let it flow from frame to frame. And you've got a guy about to be shot in bed, and it seems that there is no one else in the bed. Then in the next frame you have the dead guy and dead woman in the best together, both wih bullet holes in their head, but there's not any blood all over the place. So first, where's all the blood? And second, how did the woman end up in the bed?
Lastly, forthe most part, they all seems quite posed. And there are times where images can look posed, but I feel like this isn't one of them. For something like this, image should be slices of time of an event that was unfolding. And even though the object was always to capture frozen image, that represent a scene, it is still important for everything unseen before and after an action to happen. Particularly the scene of the woman reacting to the threat of being slapped, and the man reacting to the threat of being shot. They both look like someone was standing there posing like they were pretending to be afraid of being slapped/shot. When trying to capture this kind of moment, it's really important to play out the entire thing, and just take a frame of the real moment happening. Just because we're only trying to capture a split second of the moment, doesn't mean that the moments before and after what we want to capture aren't equally important. It's those moments that give the capture moment it's credibility.
Most of all, I think you tried to tell too much in too few frames. I think you could have either used more frames, or better yet, simplified the story. I'm just barely beginningto explore video work, and I've learned so much about how different video and still work really are. I thought they would be much more alike than they actually are. There are lots of areas of overlap, but far more areas when if anything, they're completely opposite. One of the biggest things I've realized, is that it requires so much more variety of coverage to tell a story with video than with photo. If you go to a wedding and take really good pictures of the 15 most significant things that happened, it would be pretty good coverage. But if you did that with video, it would seem chunky, and have no continuity or flow. It's the little things in video that help things blend. But in this instance, I really think this is more like video work. Trying to tell a continuous narrative through stills. But without the little things that help the story move along, it feels like it requires too much thought to figure out what's going on.
Great work all in all. I'm sure a ton of hard work went into this, and I'm sure it was a fantastic learning experience. I think the ability to tell continuous stories through still frames is the hardest part of photography. So don't feel bad if it didn't come out perfectly.
Cheers,
Ben
