Visual Look
The film opens up with some brief old black and white footage along with a voice-over narration. This is similar to how the first movie started, but certainly much better put together. I only wished it was a bit longer, and was incorporated with the next sequence - several shots of the pervious film . Since these are formatted as a trilogy, it’s a good idea to do a recap, but it might also be a good idea to tie the two sequences together in some way. It would also be helpful to hear Jared’s narration of events, especially since we find out later in the film that his girlfriend Rachel didn’t make it. That’s a piece of information that ought to be given at the beginning, since the audience will probably be wondering where she is.
It looked as though this film made a bit better use of stock footage than the first one. There were some nice shots taken inside the hospital, a couple aerial and outdoor shots of building, and a very nicely pieced together scene between stock footage of a helicopter landing and a patient being loaded and some close-ups that were shot by the filmmakers.
The makeup and costume effects on the zombies looked a lot better in this movie as well – the first film seemed to be overcompensating by using extreme special effects, such as over-saturating the color or purposefully blurring the footage, in order to hide some of the zombie makeup. In this film, however, there was actually some nice variety in makeup, which was almost a bit refreshing as compared to just one standard zombie “look.”
There were, however, still quite a few visual issues in this film. A lot of the handheld shots were really shaky, and were even too much to suggest it had been done on purpose to add to the frantic tone of the movie. A lot of these shots could’ve benefited from a tripod, or even a homemade steadicam (there’s an article on how to make your own here at MFM.) There were quite a lot of washed-out shots, both in interior and exterior. It’s difficult to say what may have caused this, but it’s likely the interiors were caused by the f-stop on the camera being set too wide, letting in too much light. The exterior washouts could’ve been caused by the same problem. For a simple solution, use an ND (neutral density) filter that cuts down the amount of sunlight allowed into the camera. The downside, of course, is getting footage shot on non-sunny days to match the footage shot with the ND filter. But, either way, it’s still a lot easier than trying to fix washed-out footage, as washed out footage actually has lost most of its detail and color information that can never be reconstructed.
I noticed quite a few shots that looked to have been either green or blue screened. While green- and blue-screening is a good resource, the quality of these particular shots wasn’t all that great, which made them stick out like a sore thumb. While it’s difficult to find the resources to make these types of effects look near-perfect, it might be best to just avoid using the images if they will end up looking out of place. (For info on doing greenscreen well, check out our Greenscreen Issue. Additionally, our edtior, Jeremy Hanke, is writing a book on this subject, which should be out by 2009 from MWP.)
Use of Audio
This movie had a very similar score to the first, and I liked it just about as much (except for one instance where I noticed one piece of music that had already been used in the first movie; this type of thing kind of runs along the same lines as repeated bits of video footage, it’s generally a bad idea.) I also noticed a lot more ambient sounds in this film, particularly in the hospital. This gave a much better sense of realism than the first film had. There weren’t a whole lot of dialogue issues; a bit of echo here and there, and, on occasion, the dialogue was difficult to understand, but on the whole it wasn’t too bad. (I do still have to chastise the filmmaker for using the on-board microphones, but since I went into detail about this issue on the previous critique, I won’t re-iterate everything here.)
There was one moment in this film that was very off-putting. For no apparent reason, an extremely upbeat 50’s style song cut into the midst of all the zombie drama, playing over footage that was half serious and half comedic. Whether this was an attempt to tie into the retro drive-in ads mentioned previously, an attempt to briefly lighten the mood, or just to interject a bit of humanity into a various serious and almost inhumane situation (something along the lines of the film I Am Legend where Will Smith’s character sets up dummies in an abandoned storefront, just to give himself some semblance of human interaction.) I couldn’t really tell what the filmmakers were trying to get across, but, whatever the intent, it seemed very much out of place.
