Thank you all so much for your feedback! I really appreciated it. I tried to fix the beginning since there were multiple comments about being confused about the peer pressure aspect of it.

Here are my own comments about my rough cut:

Studium. I wanted to explore a real fear of mine with this film. The house in the film is across the street from where I live, and it’s creeped me out for three years. I’ve had friends who want to explore it and I’ve always been very against the idea, so I basically wanted to make a film about what I think would happen if I did go poking around there. Luckily, there was only one real life creepy person and he told me and my friend to stay away from the house because it’s “no bueno”. We took his advice and finished filming very soon after that interaction. I also had no intention of this, but in Eimi’s comment she said it made her think it was about gentrification, and that my character had no business poking around there, and I think that’s very on point. As creepy as we like to make old houses like that, I know that homeless people do stay there, and it’s very easy for people who don’t have to live like that to say, “oooooh, so creepy!”

Punctum. I personally love the long, quiet shots of the house where I’m looking upward at it. The sunny day and blue sky contrast to this decrepit building that contains who knows what. (there’s no actually easy way to access the inside, so I don’t know how squatters do it, but they find a way)

Goals. I wanted to make a found footage horror film about one of my fears.

Successes. I used glitch presets for the video effects and I distorted my own audio to imply a possibly supernatural power corrupting the file.

Shortcomings. The vagueness of the ending and what happens to the girl after the creepy man shows up with his arms outstretched. I made that part of the film more glitchy in an attempt to show a chaotic struggle between the two of them.

Point-of-view. This film is from “my” perspective. It’s definitely not far from how I would react, but it was really fun creating a character for this film and acting a little bit for the first time.

Structure. I ended up splitting it pretty evenly between day and night. The daytime being a goofy snapchat documented adventure, and the nighttime being me freaking out and looking for my keys with the camera app.

Pacing. The end when he lunges at me and I run away and then he’s behind me was too awkward. As mentioned above, I made the whole sequence more glitchy to try to rectify that.

Sensory Alignment. I’m pretty proud of the soundtrack overall, I didn’t want to clean the audio up too much because I wanted it to sound like I was recording off my phone. I didn’t like my scream/yelp in the rough cut, so I recorded myself screaming and mixed it in with the glitchy sounds.