Factory

"Factory" plays like one of those moments of impulsive creativity you may get from time to time -- maybe you're not a writer, or a musician, or an animator, but you get the bug in your head and you just start making something with no prior planning. It's not going to be great, you know that, but you keep cranking it out just to see where it goes, and it starts to pick up steam, and you're enjoying doing it.

Then, all of a sudden, you run out of ideas and it occurs to you to wonder why you were doing this. You look back over it. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't really go anywhere. It doesn't really say anything. It's kind of embarrassing. You hurriedly bring it to a conclusion, and look back over it as a whole. You don't know what you've made, but you've made it, so you might as well share it. I don't know if that's the case here, but I've done exactly the above before, and watching this gave me the same feeling.

Pizza the Hut's Film Fest contribution bears a stylistic similarity to Michael Sandford's END, which I wrote quite a bit about earlier this year. They're both abstract and there's a sort of compelling atmosphere about them. The key element Factory lacks is the confidence to follow through. END felt like it had a resolution, a punctuation mark that, if not explainable as a specific theme, still resonated in the context of the earlier events of the movie. Factory's ending is like a weak punchline.

In fact, everything from the last third of the movie doesn't have much going for it. It's less like Pizza couldn't think of an ending, but instead couldn't think of anything BUT a beginning. I was interested where this opening concept was going, and as soon as I saw the "blob of colors" and heard what I think were Doraemon sound effects, I realized this wasn't going anywhere.

There's nothing wrong with abstract movies as a general rule, you're just playing with a storytelling format that can't be easily described in words. You're constructing your own framework of reality, with rules and occurrences that don't have real-world parallels. You'll know you've made a good one if these alien, illogical, indescribable representations make a kind of unspoken, consistent sense within each other. I don't expect abstract movies to make sense, but I want them to not make sense in the same way, all the way through. Factory first doesn't make sense in a compelling way, and then doesn't make sense in a different, not compelling way.

Critical Score: 30/100
Personal Score: 32/100

[Pizza The Hut]

Thanks for the review dawg.

You are mostly accurate about the beginning: I just had an idea and wanted to see it through. I actually did think out this ending sort of; I plan to tie it into other ideas I had and make it make more sense. So yeah, it was rather inconsistent..cool idea at the beginning that is versatile, and I chose to tie it into other ideas...maybe not such a smooth transition.

I'm thinking about using this entire piece WITHIN a larger work, but I don't know..I already released it as a standalone, so I'm not sure, haha.

And for the record I made the sound effects, so I'm flattered you thought they were professional Doraemon sound effects.