Watching Choices

We watched seven different vesrions of Choices, five of which kept the name. We changed our version's name to Doorways. Modesty aside, I thought that ours was about the third best, behind one called Exit, and Team Awesome's Choices. But there were learnings to come from all of them.

Yesterday we watched screenings of the seven different short films made using Abi Green's script Choices.

With stunning lack of originality, five of the films were called Choices; only two of the groups actually changed the title. The first group called theirs Exit, while we changed ours to Doorways.

We opened with Exit, which was one of the best films, largely because they dispensed with much of the admittedly clunky plot devices, and concentrated instead on exploring the emotional effects of finding oneself able to jaunt. (I've deliberately used [the pictured] Bester's term for teleportation, because it carries within it the emotional consequences) Exit was also very well edited, used a whole load of locations, and was comparatively under-acted compared to later offerings. Against that, the ending was a little murky -- I got the impression that there was some kind of emotional equilibrium achieved, but I'm not sure exactly what the girl had to do with it.

Almost as good was Team Awesome's (So modest!) Choices. The acting was better than most -- the killer apart-- although the default reliance on swearing rather weakened it. The denouement was well worked out and was probably the best and most positive outcome. My only criticism of that was it should simply have ended when Dan and Olivia appeared, rather than the 15 or 20 seconds of Greg afterwards, which was unnecessary, and rather weakened the effect.

There was also an intermittently funny comedy version which unfortunately misfired badly at times. Parts of it were hilarious, parts of it not so.

And then there was ours, which yes, did spend too long on the night scene but had superb end credits, both courtesy of Jaeeun, who did a brilliant job, and Teagan. No one commented on the music, but I thought ours worked well, and the actors generally managed not to overact or swear. There were valid comments that it was unclear whose voice the v/o belonged to.

There were three others that weren't so good, but I'd rather accentuate the positives, and pass over the others. What came out of it was that we all needed someone to take a look at the next film we make prior to screening, to ensure that we've explained plot points adequately, and that we all need to exert stronger control over the cast -- although I thought we worked ours fairly well.

Hopefully at some point we will be able to post links, so people outside the class can take a look.