The Escapist Film Festival 2010: Q.E.D.

[Emergent]

Q.E.D.

Character based action drama set in the EMERGENT roleplaying universe, Q.E.D. is a fast-paced serial featuring science fiction elements with a gritty, stylized presentation. Pilot, named "Trial by Fire." Higher resolution video available upon request.

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[Moon_Called]

First off, "gritty" and "stylized" do not mean "horrible green-screen job". The acting was poor, and that was only made worse by the poor lip-syncing job. The concept is interesting and with better writing could be something really cool, but right now you need to take some acting and editing lessons. The action scenes were drawn out, and the dialogue bland. In the scenes where I wasn't being told explicitly what was going on, poor acting and editing made it hard to figure out what was happening in the scenes without dialogue.

 

[Reverend Del]

This has an interesting concept behind it, but the execution was awful. Poor acting, horrible lip syncing and some of the worst writing that I've seen since I last watched a daytime soap opera marathon.

 

[Emergent]

Hey guys! Thank you for taking the time to watch and review our entry. To address the criticism (which is valued, mind you), I would like to say that the guys who worked on the project with me put in a lot of effort to get usable audio and video out of the equipment we had, which was essentially a dv sony handycam, green construction paper, house lamps for lighting, and a lot of shareware and freeware applications. With more time to polish the chroma key, level the audio, and render the backgrounds (we made them all 3d lol, and just didn't have time to render it all out...), I think we could have put in a lot more polish. I'll take personal responsibility for the writing and acting, but the lip synching (audio timecode)problem just sort of appeared in a brutally compressed render we were forced to resort to when we encountered upload problems.

If you enjoyed the video at all, or at least are interested in seeing the video as we intended to submit it, please check out the following URL (it's a youtube video of the 190mb version): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgCUu1aDhLQ

Again, thank you for watching, and please let your friends know about this Film Festival. What the Escapist is doing here every year is a great thing for amateur filmmakers, the escapist fans, and the gaming industry as a whole. We should all put in the effort to promote it.

 

[ewhac]

Why am I reminded of Immercenary [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immercenary]?

 

[Emergent]

Never heard of it. I tried googling it, too, and couldn't find any screenshots, only a jpg of the cover. Looks kind of cool, though, in a semi-but-not-quite kind of retro way. Anyway, thanks for watching Q.E.D.

 

[loricrisp]

Great Job! I loved the concept and the writing. You have huge potential. Especially if you did this without proper equipment and construction paper! Keep going with this.. the improvising is what impressed me most.

 

[Emergent]

Aww, thanks for the encouragement.

 

[King Kool]

I gotta say... as much as the special effects and acting and lip-sync were pretty bad... this is not an unambitious attempt. I don't know how old you guys are, but chances are good nothing I did at that age even approached this in it's ambition. I'm impressed.

My advice is: when you're filming stuff for the greenscreen, you need to plan everything out very carefully to make sure you have enough coverage.

 

[Emergent]

Thank you kindly, King. Pulling a chroma key off a green screen made of construction paper using DV video was a particular challenge, one that in the end I wasn't prepared for, to be honest. I ended up with some good keys, but in general they were poor. 48 individual videos in the composite had to be keyed by hand, and I just ran out of time.