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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  4418 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Don't Watch "Man of Steel" [Outdated]

...I thought you had 44 minutes of footage. Holy shit. Siskel & Ebert's "At the movies" is 44 minutes when you take out the commercials, dude.





cgod  ·  4418 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Have you watched any of the Red Letter Media reviews of the star trek movies? I think some of them might be longer than the films they were reviewing. A few of them have been watched a few million times. That being said, you need to be a fantastic reviewer to push into the thirty minute range.

JTHipster  ·  4418 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'd argue that you really need to be a worse reviewer to push through the thirty minute range. We really didn't say a whole lot; there's going to be a reshoot this week with the criticisms in mind to make up for it.

I write overly long and I talk overly long. Its not a strength, its a weakness. There will be a time when I am a better critic and will believe in earnest that the film I just watched deserves 40 minutes of coverage. Man of Steel is not a film that deserves 40 minutes of coverage. Star Wars VII might be, but for that we'll need to see.

I have my notes for improvement, and will work based off that. I might do a video review for the next one as practice, since I actually suspect that my plan to reshoot Man of Steel will go poorly. But we'll see.

And yes, all of those reviews are great.

kleinbl00  ·  4418 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I have not. I have, however, done three series for Youtube and one for WB.com. All told, several million dollars worth of web videos.

None of them were over seven minutes.

It's also worth noting that their highest rated video, for ep II, is in nine parts.

Part 1 has 2.6m views.

Part 2 has 1.3 - click through to part II is 50%.

Parts 3 through 9 have around a million views each. So it's pretty safe to say that the appetite for a 40-minute review is half the appetite of a 9 minute review, all else being equal.

A 60-minute TV program, minus commercials, comes in at around 42 minutes these days. So as far as commitment, we're in the same range as, say, LOST or Breaking Bad. Can you fill up that much time? Sure. Should you?

No.

I saw PROMETHEUS with an IATSE camera operator, a Cinematographer's Guild cinematographer and an Illustrator's Guild storyboardist/designer. Between them they were instrumental in creating Star Trek, After Earth, Zodiac and the Chronicles of Riddick.

We couldn't have found 40 minutes to say about Prometheus and of the four people there, three of them had worked with Ridley Scott and/or Damon Lindelof and/or Charlize Theron in a professional capacity.

cgod  ·  4418 days ago  ·  link  ·  
This comment has been deleted.
cgod  ·  4418 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I enjoyed the red letter media reviews more than the films he reviewed. But I will admit that think most movies are too long and you can't get me to watch a two minute review normally.

JTHipster  ·  4418 days ago  ·  link  ·  

We actually had another 40 minutes cut.

Part of the issue is that our unstructured talk meant that large sections of it had to be kept or the review would flow really oddly. There weren't any good down times, so I'm going to break down most reviews in to things that are more manageable.

I'd rather get a review down to 10-20 minutes per movie with the occasional 40 minute review if we really want to talk about it. That's my new pet project, along with figuring out the fucking camera. That's way worse image quality than it should be, since it records in a decent resolution and allows for optical zoom.

kleinbl00  ·  4418 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I get that. But you've also got like a full minute of nothing but music and the MoS logo.

This video is twice as long as your intro music.

Nobody is going to watch a 4-minute review, let alone a 40 minute one.

JTHipster  ·  4418 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'll keep that in mind for future reviews. I expected it to be pretty bad, its the first video of any length I've had to edit.

I could also do every cut better and really shorten the time for each gag clip. The only one I really think i got even moderately correct is the general zod speech towards the end. The cut from the review was poor but I felt the clip itself was a decent length.

If I have time today I'll re-edit it, but I might chalk this up as baby steps and get to writing the World War Z review.