"8.7 out of 10 "

When an old man misses his train at a Boston Train Terminal, he ends up accidentally preventing a young man from catching his train. As both wait for the next train, the old man decides to confide in the young man who waits with him about secrets concerning a local politician that only he claims to know. The young man is at first skeptical, dismissing the tales as the ramblings of a senile old man, but, as the old man recounts his stories, begins to wonder if there might not be some truth to the elderly man’s words.

Possibly the briefest synopsis of a film I’ve ever written in the history of this magazine, I can not explain more without including numerous spoilers to the film. I try only to include spoilers if there are flaws with the ending of the film. This film’s ending works well enough that spoilers are therefore unneeded.

Content
From a writing perspective, this film breaks all the rules about low-budget, short films. All the things you’re not supposed to do in low budget shorts, like make them about conspiracies, use lots of firearms, involve serial killings, and require lots of special effects, this film does. And, because the film is animated, it’s able to do these at a consistent enough level to get away with them and create a believable story.

The animation is a bit blocky with somewhat blurred lip movements, which, at first, causes you to have difficulty connecting with them and believing that they are real. (This is of course, due to the fact that Mr. Connell did all the work on the film rather than a hundred animators on a Pixar film.) However, the story and pacing of the film are so compelling that, within a few minutes, you’re hooked into the film.

The dialogue between the world wise “Old Man” and the math-whiz “Young Man” is sharp and humorous, with a snap to it that you rarely see in suspense films. With a healthy dose of profanity mixed in, the dialogue’s tempo and content actually reminds me tremendously of the dialogue between Randall and Dante in Clerks, with the Young Man reminding me of Randall and the Old Man reminding me of Dante. As the tight acting from the two main characters shone through and the plot wove itself together, I found that I was growing increasingly anxious to see how he would finish the film. To my pleasure, the ending of the film worked well, with a pleasing punch of unexpectedness to it.

Visual Look
The overall look of this film was quite impressive. While we’ll break down the main portions of visual look as we normally do, we’ll also look at character model and animation due to the animated nature of the film.

Because of the number of flashbacks in the Old Man’s tale, there were plenty of places for Mr. Connell to use creative cameras, and he really did. Whether it was to crane down from Boston’s skyscrapers to the subway tunnel below, dolly through a large crowd of people at a book signing, or letting bodies fly past the camera in an explosion, he got shots no microfilmmaker could hope to get in a live-action film. He also used shallow depth of field quite well. (Although there was scene, toward the end, in a bathroom in which the out of focus person in the background looked very digitally out of focus—a situation which causes fractal lines rather than a true soft focus. This might be able to be fixed with some of the new 3D Camera focus features in After Effects 7.)

His use of lighting was also quite good, with everything from the classic prison lighting of a jail sequence, to the soft lighting of a living room, to the overwhelming light of a government experiment gone awry.

The visual effects were strong and well set up, but a bit problematic as well, because, like is so often the case, real visual effects compositing software doesn’t look quite right in a 3D animated world. This is a problem that the folks who create the 3D cut-scenes for video games have been wrestling with for years.

For a one man operation, the animation and look of the characters in this film was very solid. Throughout the film Mr. Connell made use of newscasts playing in the background to jog the memory of his protagonists. These were very well designed and looked very nice. The overall look of the characters and the complexity of their total animation were especially impressive.

Obviously, as I mentioned in the content section, the animation and the clothing of the characters was a bit on the stiff side, reminding me of some of the better animation done in machinema. (Machinema animators hack the code found in 3D video games and then create films using the 3D models.) The mouth movements were also a little strange, with a feathery feel to them. For future films, Mr. Connell might want to consider utilizing Crazy Talk 4 (which we reviewed here) for mouth animation, as it has a more concrete feel to many of the mouth movements.

Use of Audio
The dialogue in the film was quite understandable, but tended to range from muddy to somewhat muffled. At the beginning it was more noticeable, which may either have meant that it got better or it may simply have meant that you got used to it. (For folks unfamiliar with the first term, muddy audio lacks clarity, but it isn’t really muffled.) Things that can cause these issues are using extremely inexpensive mics, having the mic at the wrong distance, or trying to record dialogue on location that should have been recorded in a studio (whether professional or homemade). As a portable dat recorder was listed as part of the audio gear, my guess is that Mr. Connell tried to record the audio in a non-studio location.

For animated films, as with films that need to have dialogue redubbed, it’s a good idea to record dialogue in almost an ADR-style setup. (We show how to set up a home ADR studio in our last issue here. Obviously, for animation, it would be unnecessary to have the actor listening to past versions of their lines as is the case for looping, but the overall setup would be very similar. Additionally, the filmmaker could substitute a good USB mic like the Blue Snowball mic that we reviewed in this issue for the shotgun, since there is no original audio that must be matched.) For a subway tunnel location, once the dialogue is recorded cleanly in the ADR “studio”, then you can record room tone in a subway tunnel and add reverb to the lines to mimic a subway tunnel’s acoustic signature. Done in this order, the sound should be very clean and crisp, with the director having maximum control over the sound.

The sound design and sound effects in this film were quite good, with everything from the sound of a faucet running to the sound of plastique exploding showing up quite cleanly. The music by Ricardo Poza was very good, with a truly compelling pace that pulled you into the storyline even faster than the snappy dialogue.

Use of Budget
The cost of this film was largely tied up in Mr. Connell getting LightWave and sound editing software, along with the models for LightWave and the upgrades for his computer to run LightWave. With that in mind, his use of budget was excellent. He got what he needed to pull off the project and, unlike virtually any other micro-film, he was able to put in almost all the labor by himself—nearly two years worth. (Not to diminish the roles of his co-producer, his music composer, or his voice talent, of course.)

Lasting Appeal
This has a lot of lasting appeal both due to the way it’s told and due to the creativity it shows. I definitely found it interesting to rewatch and to show to other people. Not only that, but for microfilmmakers in animation, this should serve as an encouragement to pursue animation even with no budget.

Overall Comment
As the first animated film we’ve reviewed here at Microfilmmaker Magazine, Saul Goodman represents the cross-over from machinema and home animation efforts into the mindset and smart writing of ultra-indie cinema. I look forward to seeing what Mr. Connell does for future animated films, as his expertise continues to grow, and I look forward to seeing what other micro-film animators do who are inspired by this film.