@Paul Hearding: Excellent feedback, Paul: I agree with you 100% on those points. I would say that audio is our weakest point so far. We shoot with very low-grade equipment on a two-man crew (Adam and myself) and one of the things we desperately want/need is a sound op, someone who'll run a mixer and a shotgun/boom mic for us. Of course, crew in LA costs money unless you have the right connections, one of the reasons we hope that "contract" means "funded" in Escapist terminology >
Even in post-production, I was the only person editing the audio, and I had about an hour and a half to not only edit all of the audio, but compose the music as well -- it led to the audio not only being unbalanced, but I'd go as far as to say that it's one of the worst audio editing jobs I've ever done. So definitely, that's something we'll be paying more attention to in future work.
As far as the HUD goes, again I'm completely on the same page as you. I created that thing, and it's one of the things we almost cut out of the finished product because of how low-grade it was, but it seemed to help keep the spirit of a video game alive. As for it being out of place or obtrusive a lot of the time, I agree; the HUD was an afterthought, something that we didn't know whether or not we wanted to try up until about the last three hours of editing, when I decided to just put it in for the heck of it. It's actually the biggest and most consistent mark against the movie that we've had so far, so I want to do things like that better in the future. One thing we'd put our money towards is hiring someone to actually design and create good visual FX for us, if we had it.
For future plots, Adam's really the writer. We come up with ideas equally, but he spearheads more of the full plot developments. Unfortunately, we don't know if this is something we want to do more of in the future unless we start getting money for it. Both of us are Los Angeles actors, constantly working on-set for other productions, blasting our dayjobs, networking and socializing, marketing, etc. It's difficult in there to find time to devote to our own short filmmaking process when there's no money at the end of it. If we get picked up or find some other place to shop this short to, then we'll definitely be taking everyone's viewpoints here into consideration when writing/filming our next project.
Thanks!!