The Performer

A very reluctant clown struggles with self-doubt but knows that people paid to come see him and so he needs to show them something different. Funny jokes? Not quite, more like some beautiful singing and letting it all out as though nobody is watching.

Really strong performance by the lead actor selling the nerves and then producing a soaring musical performance. The little VFX at the end witht the invisible man were also a nice touch and reframed the film a bit.

But I had issues with the film. Firstly it just felt really theatrical rather than cinematic, in particular the camerawork being practically all static; not necessarily a bad thing but the empty chairs kind of metaphorically represented my position as a viewer. I got it, he had self-doubt but overcome it and nailed his performance. What a voice. But I was being sung at and struggled to relate to anything he was singing about after getting the message early on in the song. I also felt barely any engagement to see a singular actor with no tangible backstory or interactions with other characters come on stage and sing.

The pacing was in my book very slow. I'm not suggesting you should have made an action film by any means but I'm watching this again and see you used practically the whole 5 minutes when I felt that at least 60-90 seconds of the run time could have been reduced to give us exactly the same slice of life story.

I know I'm being harsh, well done on making the Christchurch shortlist but my points above are why this was not my personal cup of tea.

Story: 1.5/5
Technical: 3/5
Elements: 3/5
Overall: 2/5

A sad, yet ultimately warming musical effort with one central song the carries the film. And it's a quality song, well performed and mixed. It's just the usual story though on whether or not one song a musical makes. I really wish the opening monologue had been a song too as this would have been a better sell during the "Talking-to-yourself" in the mirror trope. It really does pull me out of a film when I see this done in what really should be an internal monologue. The film could have also come to a close with for example, a refrain, to round things off.

Nicely filmed and edited, so well done!

Cool film team.

Your actor did a great job, with some good writing for him - well done there.

Setting could have been better, could have had some more angles, different shots to spice up the video - but meh. Audio could have had some dealing to - but meh.

Loved the song, enjoyed the story with the use of the invisible element - great job!

An incredible twist ending, which recontextualizes an other-wise pretty empty story!

Unfortunately, that recontextualizing doesn't do enough heavy lifting to push this film past the shortlist, which is a shame because it's such a great twist and good storytelling in it's own right.

The meat of the film is basically just a clown performing a pretty good song - but it ends up feeling more like a music video than a short film.

I'm hard pressed on how to improve things here - my instincts would say the song itself should be more relevant to the world of the film - perhaps it's about living in an invisible world or dealing with invisible things, and maybe we could see some cutaways of the clown interacting with these invisible things and scenarios - but then, on the flip side this would also ruin the twist!

It's a tricky situation, and one I'm sure has an answer, but unfortunately I can't think of it, and I don't think you guys did either.

That ending though.

Things you got right: A powerful ending which completely changes what you've seen preceding it

Things to work on for next time: Making what precedes the ending actually feel relevant and compelling within the story.

your green screen morph suit key out was bloody brilliant and you should be proud of your work with that :) was so cool

I really liked the song! Will has a really good voice, I think this would have fallen on our ears even better if the capture of the audio was a bit cleaner, but you work with what you have! So well done and might I suggest getting it recorded for my Spotify please and thank you <3

The story was pretty light and I would have loved to see more hints towards the people being invisible throughout to keep it grounded but you know what musical is so gosh darn hard that I'm impressed with this effort regardless of the fact, nice job! Look forward to seeing what you guys do next.