My Dumpling

I really enjoyed this film. Witty and well timed line delivery from the actors and some brilliant moments the showcase the hilarious dynamic within families. The storyline was imaginative and there were some great chaotic moments that really lent themselves perfectly to the genre given.

I immediately started imagining this as a feature film. Loved it!

There's a lot to love about MY DUMPLING - and while almost all of its shortcomings can be explained as "it feels a bit unfinished", there is plenty of stuff to dig into here.

I loved this premise. As someone above has stated, this could probably be a feature film idea, and I think the set up of a bunch of friends stealing a coffin from a funeral because they hate the dead man's lover, is exactly the kind of crass and morally dubious shit that I personally LOVE in comedies. Great interpretation of Comedy-of-Errors.

We open on a pretty incredible birds eye view shot too - but in what ended up being one of this film's biggest set-backs, these gorgeous overhead drone shots which recur throughout, spoil us because they then cut to some very under-graded footage - such a bummer because I think this film would pop if it were graded as well as those shots.

Some dodgy sound mixing as well, including some very loud characters, and while I love the development of the coffin burning up, it certainly doesn't look like much of a fire took place when they return to where it was left - some dirtying up the grass or even some post-production flame would have sold this a little better.

I do love that the ashes end up in a KFC box though, and I think it provides such a great landscape to boast this film's true secret weapon, it's incredible characters, and their hilarious chemistry.

I'm really gutted this film falls short because these quirky fun comedies are the type of film the competition needs more of - I just think you maybe needed to give it a little more time in the edit booth to smooth out some edges.

Challenge for next year: A couple more hours in the edit bay would have sharpened this up, and yes, this is unhelpful advice for a competition with a time limit, but what this actually means is next year, try get to your edit a little earlier. Or have multiple editors working on different parts of the film!