Steve and Friends

First off, hilarious team intro. Go watch Potion Seller on Youtube. Started strong with great composition and a promising lead actor. The Mistaken Identity plot point could have taken an interesting turn but instead lost traction and the impact of the ending fell flat. What felt like the guy losing his mind, and choking something until it disappeared, suddenly was a ploy from his coworkers..... I think. Puppets seem to appear a lot in 48 hour films (I assume because people don't want to show their faces on camera) and end up being somewhat of a crutch. The team shows promise, and look forward to seeing what they come up with next.

A 'Rainbow' style puppet kids show host loses the plot when his role is taken over by a cardboard cutout of himself. Good use of the required prop and perhaps a better unintentional black comedy than several films that got that genre. My main grip with the film was the lack of a strong story arc and any sort of dynamic film making. Short films in particular can work with simple camera work, even static as the case may be and this can even translate well to feature length cinema (Ceylan, Tarr, Tarkovsky etc) but for a simplistic film such as was presented I would have preferred a dramatic arc that gave us a clearer beginning, middle and end. The way the film presented suffered from the randomness of evens presented. Your lead clearly gave it his all which I commend.

A little bit hard/frustrating to follow. I thought the characters who lived behind the couch were hilarious though.

Started well with the Play School/Rainbow set up, but became slow and confusing in the middle. The team intro was fun and I liked the bread puppet (especially the voice), I just think the audience got that he was being replaced in the first few seconds so that middle section could've moved a whole lot faster.

What a weird one! The acting was topnotch and conveyed a dry humour that carried the surrealism to a comfortable place for the audience. I loved the studio feel and the busyness of the scenes. What let the film down for me was definitely the genre - I would have liked more confusion regarding Steve's identity. Great, well lit film with tidy sound. The editing was choppy in times and felt very guerrilla-styled in it's pace. Can't say I fully understood what the point of it was but I get the feeling there's lots of hidden detail, or at least the illusion of secret aspects to this film that didn't fully come across in the final cut.

This film made me laugh. It was a cute, silly idea. This heat and this film reminded me how the production values don't really matter as long as you're enjoying something.

I must be a sucker for weird and wonderful short films, because this one's eccentricity really tickled my fancy. It felt as though the team thought, "Mistake identity. Huh... you know what? Let's completely screw with everyone who has ever thought they knew something about this genre". Steve and Friends was the most in-depth deconstruction and satirisation of a genre I've seen at a 48 Hours heat (although, to be fair, I've only been to two heats, being a newbie). The way such a ridiculously low-stakes example of stolen identity was played with conviction and malice aforethought was an inspired turn. Kudos for the puppets behind the chair, by the way, as characters they aided the plot and feel of Steve's emotional arc while not detracting when they weren't needed and providing brilliant comic relief. Negative points: few but they still exist. The puppetry suffered somewhat from a lack of strong voice acting. The "voice" part of voice acting doesn't mean you get away with not having to show expression, it means you are limited to being able to act with ONLY one part of the actor's physical toolkit, which makes it even harder to be believable. Some issues with colour grading also, as I felt it was far too saturated in orange the entire time and could have benefited from contrasting colour schemes between the sanity and insanity portions of the film. As I said, this must just be my personal cup of tea, because others in my team's viewing entourage said they absolutely hated it. Fair enough, and I see where that view comes from, but I think if you truly get this film for the deconstructive, pseudo-surrealist masterpiece it is, there are endless delights. Good job guys, near-perfect marks :)