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The editing of the film was quite good, with basic editing choices and font selections helping to tell the story fittingly. There were a few scenes of special note, however. The first one is the opening credits, which blend photos from Shawn, Chris, and Ray graduating high school with shots of dividing coke, smoking pot, and loading a bong. To further tie the name of the film and the opening credit shots with the credit titles, each of the titles reveals itself in a puff of smoke. This instantly draws you into the film and makes you interested in what’s going to come up next. Additionally, Mr. Shahin has changed the opening titles by putting a light drop shadow to pop out the title text more. While this effect could be applied a little more strongly, it definitely helps make the titles easier to read.
The second scene occurs midway through the movie, as Shawn becomes more addicted to more powerful drugs. As his drug use escalates, his theft from his work also escalates and his perception of time blurs together. To show this concept, editor Corey Becker and Shahin used Final Cut Pro’s time remapping option and motion trails on a simple security camera shot and some close-ups of Shawn counting and pocketing money. The blurring acceleration is a simple, yet very effective way of showing Shawn’s perception. Another good editing scene is the scene where Ray decides to and wipe out his competitor in the drug wars, Kevin, by shooting him with a shotgun. While part of this was due to how creatively it was shot, the editing played a big part in allowing the filmmaker to portray a gruesome murder without requiring the special effects of a shooting. Sound effects, cutaways, close-ups, and some of the most realistic blood I’ve seen allowed the killing to seem both real and believable.
Use of Audio
In my first critique, I brought up the fact that there were some serious issues with the audio in the film, from audio that had noticeable distortion, to excess background noise, to dissimilar background noise, to audio that was just too soft. I explained that the only way to be sure to get rid of these problems was to redub the entire film. Mr. Shahin put in some admirable time redubbing a large chunk of the film.
Unfortunately, he ran into a few problems in the first 30 minutes of his film, which, truthfully, had the worst audio problems to begin with. The first problem was trying to mix dubbed and original audio in the same scene, especially when he had extras or perhaps other actors who he couldn’t get to show up to the ADR studio. The problem with doing this is that, unless you have extremely skilled ADR technicians and a Hollywood-caliber sound mixer, you are probably going to end up with results that actually sound worse than before because the difference between the two types of audio is so noticeable. Another problem he had was the fact that the new dialogue audio sounded like it was recorded with an omnidirectional mic too far from his actors mouth, rather than with a directional mic about 1 to 2 feet from the actor’s mouth. Then, when it was all brought together, the audio often had difficulty matching the reverb of the room that the action was taking place in. When all these problems came together at the beginning, audio disparity became readily available. For example, the opening bar sequence that starts the film almost seems like a kungfu film because of this disharmony, despite the fact that the sync was pretty close to being on most of the time. As time passed and everyone got more used to the rigors of audio dubbing and matching mood, the disparity became much less pronounced, and the redubbing became much more subtle. As with the acting in the film, the best redubbing and voice matching for most of the film tended to come from Michael Shahin’s own character.
For scenes that were too soft where no redubbing was done, Mr. Shahin tried to compensate for the softness by boosting the overall volume. Unfortunately, the background noise and other problems were boosted with this solution, which caused these issues to distract the viewer from the actual dialogue. Luckily, this only occurred for one major scene, which, again, was in the beginning of the film.
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