Another reason for the issues in the film came from the fact that the story is told in a strangely mixed up manner that is most reminiscent of Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love). While Mr. Cohen’s story tries to make more sense than a PTA movie, it still has this feeling of disconnect that causes people to become so confused by the storyline and the motivations of the main characters that they give up on trying to figure out where the story is going. For example, Lori decides to buy the car that killed her brother for no other reason than to piss her sister off. The audience looks at the screen with puzzlement at this. Additionally, different characters know people they couldn’t know. For example, Martin knows that an out of uniform cop is the cop that processed the wreck, even though he clearly has never met the cop or even seen the cop before. There are so many of these strange things that, rather than making the audience curious, they have a tendency to annoy and frustrate the audience, even if these questions are answered eventually.
Now, a director can have far more leeway with twists and turns in their film if they can make at least one character that the audience genuinely empathizes with. People want to root for someone, but, in the Driver Rode Shotgun, there wasn’t a single character that really drew my empathy and made me really want to see them get what they wanted. (And, in point of fact, no one in the film really seemed to want anything other than general survival, which is a fairly lowest-common denominator desire. Having a few characters with truly interesting desires that can be put into peril can also help the viewer be more interested in the film.)
The visual look of this film was a very mixed bag. The camera angles that were chosen were quite strong, for the most part. From surreal shots of the sky through tree branches to high-vantage point shots down a spiral staircase, the perspectives for this film were intelligently chosen.
Unfortunately, the images themselves appear vertically “squished.” This often happens if the filmmakers shoot in 16:9 on their camcorders and then, when they edit it, squish it further. Some editing programs don't show 16:9 formatting, causing filmmakers to try to correct the “problem” in the editor and doubling the “squeeze.” To prevent this, always render out some footage if it appears the editor isn’t handling the footage properly. It may not show up until the export.
Beyond the rendering issues of the camera, which can be corrected pretty simply, the lighting in this film had some pretty large issues, which really can’t be corrected in post. This was largely because most of the indoor lighting appeared to come from a single strong source (perhaps even one mounted on top of the camera). This resulted in very harsh shadows that were not flattering and distracted from the pleasing look of the shots. The way to prevent this is through the use of added diffusion to one’s lights and following 3 point lighting. (3 Point Lighting can be learned more about in our lighting basics article here.) If professional light kits can’t be afforded, as is so often the case for us as microfilmmakers, we have a number of articles on creating extremely low-budget light kits, which can be read here.
Another thing that can help make sure that lighting looks good before recording (and to prevent very disparate lighting from different camera angles) is the use of good video monitor. This doesn’t have to be an expensive video monitor. Rather, it can be a laptop equipped with Adobe OnLocation (PC/Mac) or divergent media’s Scopebox (Mac), which can show accurate color information, highlight overly-lit parts with zebra stripes, and even record footage straight to the laptop, so it’s already digitized.
Finally, the editing was pretty good, for the most part. There were some great edits where the editor would transition from one character closing a door to another character closing or opening a different door. This is a nice touch that works pretty well. With that said, there were also a couple of problematic edits. The biggest issues that cropped up seemed to occur in two exchanges between Jeremy and Martin – one in their apartment and one in the entranceway to their apartment building. In both scenes, the 180 degree rule was flagrantly broken a few times. (For those unfamiliar with the 180 degree rule, it is an understanding about visual psychology which states that you need to draw a line between your main characters and cut between shots positioned on one side of the line. If you try to cut from both sides, the characters flip positions on the screen, causing the person who was facing left to be facing right and vice versa. While there are some times you may want to do this to confuse the audience, it’s usually so distracting and glaringly wrong to the viewer that it’s best to avoid it unless it’s very, very intentional AND needed.) If one must use footage that’s shot on both sides of the line, try to cut to an insert shot of something that one of the characters is looking at to take the viewer out of the scene momentarily before cutting back to the opposite side of the line.
