Perpetual Pause

I especially like the guy frozen looking down at his paper with the weird face. A few actors moving that could have been replaced with a still frame overlay. Good idea, and well shot. You told a story and the characters were different at the end.

During a final exam a student freezes time in order to draft the perfect love note for the one he loves. Technically very, very good this is well-paced and spot on with its humour. The leads carry out their roles with aplomb and I was super excited to see a classroom scene that actually had a decent amount of students in it! This short carried the audience along with it and landed a satisfying ending. I did wonder how/why someone would physically write in Comic Sans but it was a funny line regardless. I'd say this will easily make the shortlist and indeed play in the CHCH final. Nailed its genre.

Nailed the genre guys - a perfect "Highschool" flick. Love the technique and exploration into different ways to freeze time. Saw a few cheeky grins in there from a few "frozen" actors ;) Overall - very well done, and a nice alternative to the usual 48 hour comedy.

*sees a classroom with a couple of kids* okay so we're gonna get some sort of basic awkward romance or something... *sees everybody freeze* Oh boy oh boy here we go kiddies show me whatcha got. Some good lines of dialogue here (skin...her skin). The ending could have been a little more polished than 'She cheats and you could do better' but I like where you went with it overall, nice job!

This team hit expectations. Loved this film

I really enjoyed this film, good story, well shot good job

I thought this was really nice work on many fronts. For one, you tell a complete narrative arc (it's surprising how few teams actually do this). Second, there's some good ambition in the concept, and I like the escalation to having hundreds of scrawled notes and the furious bystander just wanting to go home after hours (?) of frozen time. Plus, your performances and technicals were good too - enjoyed the actual actors holding a frozen pose rather than trying to do something in post. Nice job by all - keen to see what's next.

There's something about the ability to freeze time that feels intrinsically linked to the high school genre- maybe it's because of shows like "Saved by the Bell" which used freezing time as a narrative device, or maybe it's because as teenagers, probably more than any other time in our lives, we fantasize about the ability to postpone, procrastinate and even control time itself so that we don't have to face up to our bogus responsibilities. Beyond the creative concept, the casting of characters was great too, and well done getting enough extras to convincingly pull off a functioning high school, albeit a frozen one. The extras all do a great job of being paused, I didn't notice any stumbles from anyone, though I wasn't really looking for them. I also LOVE the striking visual image of a school covered in screwed up notes, and I kind of wish the film had leaned into this more and just had an absurd about of these notes falling out of closets and filling up rubbish bins. Maybe Jack has been trying to write this perfect note for years? There are a couple of plot contrivances/inconsistencies however that I would like to point out, if only for constructive criticism. I don't necessarily want to know HOW our hero has the ability to freeze time, but the fact that it froze everyone except for this girl felt like it needed a bit of explaining. For someone who has been able to freeze time his whole life, he did not seem in anyway shocked that someone was immune to his powers. I also think the stakes could have been higher here- all they have to do is write a note and Jack can unfreeze time whenever he wants. Some kind of time pressure here would have helped make the film a bit more action packed. I'm also not sure if it was entirely necessary to demonize Jack's crush, she seemed like a nice girl who lets him down easy, but then the main girl explains that she's actually a cheater and a bad person- and if this is true then it would have been nice to see this for ourselves instead of being told it by someone who could just be lying. Ultimately, I would say I would have liked to have seen a little more mileage out of the pausing time concept in the film, but hey, it's still a fantastic idea and is A+ in so many other areas that it still feels like it's own little complete piece. As for your title, "Perpetual Pause" is interesting, it kind of feels like there could have been something that suited the genre more, but this is small potatoes stuff.