Visual Look
The color and lighting balance in Mama's Foot is hugely improved from the previous film. The most noticeable improvement is the fact that the twins are wearing red shirts instead of white! (In Slumber Party, Cary and Gary wore white t-shirts which reflected light back into the camera, and appeared glaringly bright and extremely washed out in direct sunlight.) While there were a few shots that did look overexposed, the lighting was even and well-balanced throughout the film. The one place where a light source was shining directly into the camera was the second scene in Mama's room, when Gary has to give Mama a foot massage. The table lamp on the nightstand is angled directly toward the camera, which results in an area of extreme overexposure that throws off the rest of the lighting in the room. This can be fixed by simply angling the light back down onto the nightstand. The Panasonic DVX 100A (on which the film was shot) has two zebra settings to check if there is any excess overexposure in your shot. The most common settings for zebra are 80% and 100%. While you can sometimes have a few hot spots at 80% illumination, you want to completely avoid 100% illumination, via using diffusion on your lights or by using an ND filter on the camera.
One thing to keep an eye on are visual discontinuities. The most obvious example is in both phone conversations between the twins and Super Crip. The scenes are intercut between the twins and Super Crip dancing down the street while he's on the phone. When the camera cuts back to Super Crip, he's in a different position almost every time. Instead of moving closer to the camera with each cut, sometimes he's closer to the camera, and sometimes he's much farther back. During the second phone conversation, Super Crip is close enough that we can see his face as he's talking; however, the audio doesn't match up with the words his mouth is forming. It is very important to keep an eye on problems like this, because it not only throws the audience off and confuses them, but too many mistakes like this can look very unprofessional.
The only other suggestion I would make is to try to get a different location for the Clinic. It location in the film was very obviously someone's house, and that can break the audience's suspension of disbelief. A possible solution would be to find a building that looks as though it could be a walk-in clinic. The location that was used as the recording studio is a perfect example. Simply change the angle of the shot, print up some homemade signs and/or window clings, and presto, you have an official-looking clinic. If you're creative with where you place the camera, props, homemade signs, etc, you can make it look like almost any place.
Super Crip moves backward during a phone conversation with the twins;
be careful of discontinuities like this, as they can cause confusion.
Use of Audio
The audio is another element that has gotten a lot better from the previous film. Whereas before, the onboard camera mic was used, this time they used an Audiotechnica boom mic. The improvement is immediately noticeable: because the shotgun mic can get closer to the action and pick up more direct sound than the camera mic, the quality is much better and much more clear. The dialogue is much more audible, because the ambient sounds are not conflicting with it. Huge improvement in this department. However, there are times when the characters --primarily the twins-- get too loud, causing the audio levels to shoot up. This happens because the characters are too loud too close to the mic. If a scene requires them to be loud, have the boom operator move the mic farther away to compensate. The only character who wasn't quite loud enough was the Jamaican bus driver. His dialogue was very indistinct and hard to understand.
The music used throughout the film was very well done and fit in well with the various scenes. The soundtrack never overwhelmed any action or dialogue that was taking place, and complemented the scenes nicely. My only suggestion is this: if you're going to play music in the background during an intercut phone conversation (such as with Alicia and Gary), use the same music for the entire scene. It would sound better to have just one song played in the background for the whole scene instead of one song for Alicia's side of the conversation, and a completely different song for Gary's.
