UNDERFIRE War Reflection

Like my past few videos, I will be writing a reflection on our past video.

UNDERFIRE War has become my proudest video overall. Its editing and effects are vastly superior to the past videos thanks to Action Essentials 2. This was good for the overall video, yet bad for me in ways. For one, it increased the amount of time it took to edit the clips. Instead if editing every other frame, or every two frames, I often had to edit frame by frame. One clip took me a week, five straight seconds of spray and pray by Ryan. Those kinds of scenes honestly drove me a bit nuts simply because of the number of frames required to edit.

In my opinion, Julien and Ryan shine in this video. Julien, first of all, was an overall great actor in the video. Everything he did was natural; the sliding, the walking, everything. He is a natural actor, and he will most certainly be starring in our next video. Ryan did a good job doing his scenes. They weren't forced; he was simply doing the actions. They were believable and not over the top.

Matt was also good in his first role. In the beginning, it was a bit rough trying him to get to fall or react in certain ways. However, as the video went on, you can visually see his acting getting better. His facial expressions are also hilarious. Next stoner video for certain.

Henry delivered a solid performance also. His speaking parts were a bit forced, but it wasn't enough to make it sound stupid. He did a great job in the machine gun scene, grabbing the side and vibrating the gun in a realistic fashion. All of his falls were also very realistic, from his very first death to his last. All my actors were awesome.

I personally liked the angle choices. They varied more in the beginning because of the amount of time we spent on the first few scenes. Toward the end, we rushed slightly more. But I think in the end, we maintained good angles for our shots.

The action sequences were awesome, however, upon prior examination, I saw that there were not as many sequences as previous installments it seems. They were overall better though. The machine gun scene was my favorite, followed by the beginning scene and the scene right after the machine gun scene. It offers good variance in the flow of the video, from loud and exciting to quiet and unsuspecting. I had many people flip out when Ryan snuck out and shot Julien in the head because of how quiet and sudden it was.

The dialogue was okay. It could have been better I guess, but for the sake of this video, it was good enough. UNDERFIRE is not about story, it's about action. The break in the middle offers a break in fighting to prepare for the machine gun scene. It provides backstory to what happened before the video started, including my embarrassing death. Also, I think it's pretty funny, both sides. It adds personality to the characters.

I'm so proud of this video, and I truly truly hope that eventually it will become more popular on Youtube. Congratulations, friends, on another great video experience.