The first thing that bothers me is that I didn't get to include very much of the footage I got from Dungeness in the film. There were lots of really terrific shots that just didn't make it because adding too many would detract from the pacing. The shots I did use were only included as brief establishing shots before the plot begins, and though it would be easy to include more this way, it would also expand the runtime and slow the introduction of the film with nothing contributing to the narrative.

      From there, I feel that the film starts a bit too abruptly (another reason that I feel as if more establishing shots would be very jarring compared with the plot). There was meant to be a scene before the Sheriff's office that would establish Murphy and would give a little more detail about Schreiber's newspaper article, but I never got to film it because I didn't have a good set or enough actors. So the film jumps right in to Sheriff Penance berating Schreiber for writing the article, and article which the audience, at this point, knows nothing about. The scene does a decent enough job of explaining it to the viewer, but it's still a little bit of an information overload to come out of the first 30 seconds of the film, especially given that most of it is through dialogue exposition, which unfortunately is a little more 'tell' than 'show', which is the opposite of how information is best relayed in film.

      The entire film is mostly dialogue, so a lot of the time I had to rely on making my shots as good-looking as possible to keep the film visually interesting, though I doubt it would even be particularly compelling to anyone who isn't interested in cinematography and lighting. My ability to use creative and artistic cinematography was somewhat hindered through the whole production by the limits of the technology I was saddled with, pun intended, but I do feel that a lot of the creative and skilled use of lighting, exposure, and shot composition shines through.

      There are unfortunately some noticeable inconsistencies in the colour grading used in this scene, with the lighting changing its tone and the background varying in hue a little. It's not really noticeable as the film plays, but it's a mistake made in the edit bay, and given that I kept adjusting the exposure and the white balance while I was filming to try and get the lighting perfect and give every shot the right amount of darkness and exposure, it's a mistake I should be looking out for, because it's a failure to rectify a decision that I made during filming that I knew would create some differences in the outcomes of the shots.

      Regardless, the scene plays out relatively well, I think it's one of the stronger scenes in the film, which is a problem considering it's the first one and there are only five. A lot of the credit, I suppose, ought to go to that window. The lighting it gave me, and the options for shot composition, really were stellar, and obviously nothing is more helpful in the edit bay than a raw shot that already looks great.

      I do feel, however, that this scene is plagued by a problem that is present in every scene of the film, really, which is the pacing. Given the limited time and the fact that it was written in one evening, every scene feels a bit like a mad dash to give out as much expositionary dialogue and as many 'cool' lines as possible. It doesn't necessarily detract from the plot, but the problem is that it's an admittedly lazy way of moving the plot forward. The problem ultimately comes down to my character, Sheriff Penance, spending the entire film being mostly right about everything, lecturing everyone, and deciding when the plot needs to advance and where. It's a lazy, rookie writing error, and I'd give myself a pass given that it was written in one night, but it's so overt and pervasive that it's not very forgivable.

      There's little to say about the barber shop scene. The set was very dark, so the entire scene is a little fuzzy and under-contrasted. It's not great, but it serves its narrative purpose as filler and to establish Deputy Cheswick. It's also very fast, which doesn't help the inconsistent pacing of the film as a whole. Over all I think the barber's shop scene is disappointing, but there's little to be done.

      The scene wherein Sheriff Penance talks to his wife, Theresa, and she implores him not to take on Murphy, suffers from the same problem as most of the rest, which is the pacing. The whole scene feels a little quick, and definitely exhibits the issue of being an exhibition factory more than anything else. It's a genuine moment between two characters, but it does feel somewhat sullied by the poor characterisation of Sheriff Penance across the film as a whole, which is to say that no matter how good of a point another character makes he always has a better one, and he goes through the whole plot just telling people what's going to happen and why, and then he turns out to be right. It's disappointingly sloppy.

      Apart from a few shots wherein the lighting was a bit too soft and everything looks a little washed out, the shot composition and lighting through this scene is mostly good, although I do feel I took the colour grading in completely the wrong direction. The scene is unnecessarily dark and contrasted. I'm generally good enough at making use of lighting that even if a scene is dark the viewer can still tell exactly what's going on, and I do usually prefer the dark, contrasted tones, but in the setting of a family home during a heartfelt conversation it feels a little out of place.

      There was some frankly awful camera work on my part just after the very beginning of the scene, in which the angle changes and ends up all over the place over the course of a few shots. It's very jarring, the shots aren't blocked out well, and that small excerpt is just a nightmare to understand a focus on. As states, though, the rest of the scene was blocked out just fine.

      There's a shot wherein Sheriff Penance spins the chamber of his revolver. The model gun I used didn't have a spinning chamber, so I had to mask a directional blur over the chamber to make it appear as though it were in motion. The effect is very simple, and not really very noticeable, but I could tell in the edit bay that if I left the shot how it was, with the chamber staying still, that would be noticeable, so the effect definitely saved the shot.

      This scene also suffers because of the audio. I have a feeling that I may have forgotten to set the Vocal Enhancer feature in Premier to pick up 'female' voices as well as 'male' - those being the two presets - and so the voice of Sena, the actress for Theresa, has been muffled a little bit. It's understandable, and the music isn't too loud or dramatic in the scene, but it's just another small mistake that limited the results of the film as a whole, and it's frustrating that I kept making them.

      Obviously it's difficult to tell from my perspective, as I already have all the information, but I think that the scene did enough to make it clear that Penance and Murphy fought one-another in the Civil War. That, and the acknowledgement of the haircut, somehow ended up being the most significant impacts of this scene, when what I really wanted was to establish stakes and an emotional core through Theresa.

      I love the church sequence. The audio is god awful, some of the shots are way too dark and out of focus, and a couple of lines are repeated or aren't very consistent, but boy do I love it. It's overdramatic, it's overemotional, and it's a little over the top, but it works. And there are more than a few great shots peppered in there too, including one of only two shots in the film with a moving camera. In fact, the camera may have been moving a little too much. While I love the shot, there is a noticeable wobble on it as a result of my having to use Premier's War Stabiliser function to minimise the shakiness of the handheld camera movement. It's tricky without a dolly because when I attempted the motion (a slow track in) holding only the camera, the camera was very light and so it moves around too much in my hand. So I tried to do it with the tripod attached, hanging down below, which made the camera slowly sway. Neither option was ideal, so I opted to stabilise the swaying shot.

      I also got to try out a fun addition to the wardrobe; a pair of very very old sunglasses. It's always nice to see what works and what doesn't when adding little details to a character, and I find that with costume design especially it's usually the most minute intricacies that help the outfit cross the line from obviously being a costume to coming alive on-screen.

      I mentioned back before the title change, when I shot the Sheriff's Office scene, that the sets I ended up with were significantly more wealthy in appearance than I would've liked, and that is a problem with this scene too, unfortunately. I won't get into the topic of money and the church, but I do still feel as though the shantytown within which I had originally envisioned the film to be set would be a lot poorer than the sets, this one especially, makes it appear. Having shot the Sheriff's Office in a hotel, Penance's house in a mansion, and now this scene in an enormous, gothic church, I have certainly veered from the roots of the idea, as the purpose was to show the lengths that people would go to to help the downtrodden, i.e. Schreiber having to do something so contrived as invent a hero just to give people hope. Obviously the plot still works, but I do feel that it loses that element, and that is disappointing. Regardless, that isn't the main theme of the film. I think that, especially in the final version, the theme became more about consequentialism, and exploring the idea of intent vs. result, and which is more relevant in determining morality, and the film has still successfully maintained that.

      Boy, you know I generally toe the line between being unnecessarily self-critical and holding myself to a cinema-level standard, and being incredibly arrogant and prideful, but if I'm being honest I'm veering from criticism to pride the more I look at the stills provided. Obviously it's misleading, as I went through and only screen-grabbed the best shots in the film, but if I'm evaluating I have to admit that they're really good.

      Anyway, I should mention the new tone. Looking at these screenshots, and at the film itself, one would be hard-pressed to assume that the concept originally started out as a fun action-comedy musical about storybook cowboys coming to life. The final version of the film has ended up in such a bleak, gritty place, with nearly every character spending the duration being afraid, talked down to, and pondering their morality. It's a far cry from the action-packed romp that I had wanted, and it's perhaps darker even than the darkest ideas I came up with in my original twelve concepts. I can't say that I don't love that though. I'm aware that it's a place of contention in filmmaking, but I have a lot of patience for slow, droning films that present an internal struggle of ethics as more important than an external villain. With that being said, it's worth noting that there are tonal consistencies here and there because of that, as the film - having being written from five different drafts of three different concepts - does come across as a little unsure about whether the bigger problem is Murphy, or Penance's internal struggle.

      I'm not sure how I feel about the duel. I like the finale from a standpoint of storytelling, especially given the themes of consequentialism and self-responsibility, but it's a bit of a change of pace from the tone of the rest of the film, which could be seen as either a good thing or bad, and I'm not quite able to put my finger on it.

      For the most part it is tonally the same as the rest of the film. Obviously the visuals are a little different given that it's the only scene that takes place outdoors, but the dialogue, behaviour, and resonance are the same. However there is a (very) brief moment of fast-paced action accompanied by rather upbeat, swelling music, that stands out from the rest of the film, and I think the reason it stands out is because it's gone as soon as it arrives. That shot - the moment in question being when Cheswick shoots Murphy - could probably have benefitted from being slower. It's just as dramatic as it should be, and as the rest of the film is, but it suffers from being presented as a triumphant moment, when really it only lasts for a couple of seconds and then the film is back to being nihilistic again.

      Oh can I real quick take a moment to appreciate the shot pictured right? Love it.

      Anyway, the colour grading in this scene. I mentioned before that I was going for something similar to the look of Bone Tomahawk, specifically the sequence when all the characters are riding horses after first heading out of Bright Hope. I didn't match the colour grading to that as well as I could have - which isn't a bad thing, homage and inspiration are good, but obviously originality is better - but I think that the reason I didn't match it so well is also one of the potential weaknesses of the scene, and so that's why it's disappointed that I did a bad job replicating it. The thing is, I feel as though it's too oversaturated. I do, however, find it difficult to judge, because I really like how the sky looks. It's the ground and characters that are the problem.

      Unfortunately, as mentioned, it started raining just as we were about to shoot. The rain died down, but the clouds didn't, and I think this is the reason for the problem. When I envisioned the scene, I was expecting clear, or at the very least mostly blue, skies, which would then be easy to differentiate from the ground and characters when colour grading, and so I could have gotten an even better looking sky than the one in the film, while still having glossy, desaturated characters, which is the look I wanted. In the end, the sky was so grey that if I had gone with the desaturated look then every wide shot or shot filled up mostly with sky would be very black and ugly, so I'm wiling to sacrifice the sepia look I wanted for the characters in favour of the better sky and lighting.

      There's a sequence that's difficult to describe. I want to say 'sloppily edited', but honestly I don't think it's that simple. We performed it a bit too slowly, and it's very fast-paced, so it doesn't really match up to the rest of the film, and it ended up being very jarring if it was too quick, but a bit underwhelming if it was too slow. In the end I don't think I cut it together as well as I could have, but I did my best to salvage it. It's the sequence in which Murphy takes Penance in a headlock. Penance then brings Murphy's gun to his chest and shoots Murphy in the throat through his own heart.

      Penance's death, however, paid off, I feel. It's quite long and drawn out, which is what I wanted, but I think that suffers from being done with so few camera angles. I also feel that Matt and I both could have put a little more into the performance, but still the action is clear and it works. The fake blood looked good to, and that really adds to it, though I wish I'd just bitten the bullet and either put fake blood on the shirt, or edited in a seeping wound. I could have easily done that latter, and I'm not really sure why I didn't. It's a disappointing oversight.

      The final shot of Cheswick walking away isn't quite what I wanted. I had wanted Penance's corpse to be a bit more obvious, and a lower camera angle, but we discovered that most of the trees were surrounded by stinging nettles, so we couldn't frame the shot the way I wanted. I also couldn't get very low angles, because the dry grass was taller than I expected, and because the trees behind Matt obscured him due to the contrast. I still think it works, regardless, it's just not as good-looking as I wanted it to be. Wide shots from eyeline height never look as good as low-angle wide shots, in my opinion.