Award Winning Short Film "Shadows"

1. Jaan Kanellis
   February 4th, 2009 at 9:31 pm

   "award winning" seriously?

2. Kevin
   February 4th, 2009 at 9:52 pm

   lame. "You dont want this place, trust me." Now THATS some good screenwriting!

3. GeorgeHG
   February 4th, 2009 at 9:58 pm

   "award winning"???? ...is someone plugging a friends work? mediocre at best..

   definitely not up to par with the usual awesome neatorama content!!

4. Juan
   February 4th, 2009 at 10:08 pm

   its really hard to make a creepy film. i thought this was really well thought-out =)

5. Dundie
   February 4th, 2009 at 10:30 pm

   Not a bad little short. Nice atmosphere, cool idea. I don't get what some of the other commenters are whining about. Of course, this comment is coming from someone who's sick of excessive gore/violence equaling "horror" in films.

6. sw
   February 4th, 2009 at 10:36 pm

   i would like to know what award it won. anyone?

7. philliposophy
   February 4th, 2009 at 10:37 pm

   By opening up the front page to user submitted content (even in blog format), neatorama is opening itself up to problems that plague sites like digg.com.

   From time to time users will submit content, then lobby their friends to press the Neat button. There may be no such thing as 'power users' on neatorama, but with the upcoming queue, there's bound to be manipulation.

8. philliposophy
   February 4th, 2009 at 10:38 pm

   I need to follow up by saying my previous post is based on a big assumption!
   Maybe people thought this was actually neat, but given my own reaction, I thought there was foul play afoot.

9. philliposophy
   February 4th, 2009 at 10:41 pm

   @sw
   From the website:
   "Took 2nd place in Round 1 of the Master of the Macabre contest."
   Link to actual contest is here:
   http://www.projectbreakout.com/shortfilm2/

10. renderanything
    February 4th, 2009 at 10:52 pm

    My favorite bit? The stair scene where Mr. Shadow Bunny was hopping after her. That was scary beyond all reason.

11. gdw3
    February 4th, 2009 at 11:05 pm

    I get so tired of badly shot, badly lit, badly acted, badly directed short films getting passed off as artful. I understand low budget. Having no money doesn't mean you can't do these things well. Sorry, Neatorama, but this one doesn't cut it.

12. Johnny Cat
    February 4th, 2009 at 11:25 pm

    Vote.

13. AJ09
    February 5th, 2009 at 12:22 am

    Doesnt cut it is an understatement.

    Sure, its not terrible- but there tons of shorts uploaded to youtube each day that are tremendously better than this one.

    In addition to the aforementioned issues, the editing is very, very lackluster. clearly not thought out at all- the cuts dont make sense!

    This would cut it as an early level student film but nothing more.

14. LisaL
    February 5th, 2009 at 1:16 am

    Wow, that was bad. Not completely awful, but not award-winning material imo.
    Bad sound quality, bad lighting, HORRIBLE acting.....

15. Alex
    February 5th, 2009 at 1:37 am

    Thanks to the comments, I'll skip this video and save that 3 minutes that I'll never get back.

16. Mike Fine
    February 5th, 2009 at 5:35 am

    Man...they will give awards out to anyone. That was not even inventive or well done. The shadows were hilarious..not scary. Don't bother.

17. Gail Pink
    February 5th, 2009 at 9:37 am

    Very amatuerish and very "just OK."

18. Miss Cellania
    February 5th, 2009 at 10:05 am

    It would have been great if it had a punchline or a twist at the end. That's what I was waiting for.

19. mo
    February 5th, 2009 at 10:52 am

    yeah, wheres the twist? or is this absence of a twist the real twist? anyhow, there are much better ones outthere.

20. kate
    February 5th, 2009 at 2:26 pm

    wow, if that is what qualifies as award-winning, i'm pretty sure my fifth grade science fair won honorable mention out of a class of 16, so i am DEFINITELY an award-winning scientist.
    this is awful.

21. kate
    February 5th, 2009 at 2:27 pm

    *science fair project.

    (it was about dogs having ESP. like i said, award-winning science.)

22. esme
    February 5th, 2009 at 3:04 pm

    Okay, I'm definitely in the minority here, but I liked it. Then again, I'm a big fan of the movies of the 20s and 30s, like The Wolfman and Nosferatu. No, it's not perfect--the ending's a little lackluster, and you tell it was done on a very tight budget--but it's nowhere near as terrible as these comments led me to believe.

23. esme
    February 5th, 2009 at 3:05 pm

    edit: "you CAN tell"

24. Hugh
    February 5th, 2009 at 3:57 pm

    Its more of a shout out to Tia Carerras wooden acting in "Relic Hunter". The difference is Tia Carrera has failed actress kitsch pull, and this doesnt. Award winning? No.

25. RockyMilo
    February 5th, 2009 at 6:09 pm

    You people should be ashamed of yourselves. I've never seen such hateful, mean-spirited and spiteful comments. This place makes AICN's talkbacks look touchy-feely. If any of you had taken the time to read the site this was pulled from you would have learned that it's a no-budget film thrown together in a few hours (for a 3 minute contest) by a group of young individuals who are trying to learn and get experience, and they were actually rewarded for their efforts. The film itself is alright. It's not the end-all be-all and no one ever claimed it was. The story is clearly trying to regress back to a more classical period of horror, something a little more visceral than the torture porn "horror". It has issues, but overall it's fairly decent. I'd love to see you trolls get off your asses and try to do anything worthwhile. These people are out there trying, and what are you folks doing? Typing away on the internet at all hours of the night bashing innocent people who are actively trying and choosing to spend their time doing something. Their only crime, apparently, is trying.

    Or maybe I should put my opinion into words you people might actually understand: You're a bunch of f-ing a-holes.

    PS: To the Neatorama team/staff, may I suggest considering mods for the comments section instead of the little spaceman image with "troll be gone" text. It's clearly not doing it's job. And it's not just this post. Most comments in most posts tend to be equally troll-ish.

26. ESJ
    February 5th, 2009 at 8:24 pm

    RockyMilo,
    Calm down. Everyone has an opinion, and if you don't want to read other people's opinions, then don't read the comments. If these are the most hateful, mean-spirited comments you've ever seen, then we clearly don't visit the same websites. Ever heard of YouTube?

    Just because people put effort into something, it doesn't mean they're entitled to be rewarded and universally praised.

    Finally, if your immediate response to mostly reasonable comments written in full sentences is to call the writers "f-ing a-holes," they're not the problem. You are.

27. sw
    February 6th, 2009 at 12:04 am

    neatorama is definately changing. it's no longer the tight community it used it be.

28. Tinderbox
    February 7th, 2009 at 5:43 pm

    Rocky, a film should stand on its own without requiring the audience to know the production backstory. If that was so important to ward off criticism of a very reasonable kind by the posters here who naturally assumed that "award-winning" meant film festivals, then the poster should have explained the situation in the Neatorama entry.

    Even so, I don't understand what warranted a mediocre student film being posted on Neatorama at all, regardless of the circumstances surrounding its making.

29. Tinderbox
    February 7th, 2009 at 5:52 pm

    Oh, and I don't buy for a second that this got lots of "neat" votes from the normal Neatorama community. This was obviously posted as a result of vote-spamming from strangers, so get off your high horse.

    If this is the quality of material we can expect from the Upcoming Queue, then Neatorama is doing its fans no favors by implementing it for the front page, and UQ should probably be kept in its own separate section.

30. valcon3
    February 7th, 2009 at 9:08 pm

    I'm gonna have to agree with the lot of you - it was a stinker!

31. valcon3
    February 7th, 2009 at 9:11 pm

    re: rockymilo

    neatorama isn't about us learning to make film or even thinking that we're capable of doing it, but it is about high quality cool stuff from the internets - which this film clearly is not. And if people get on here and share their opinions, it's not your position to call us names.

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