Direct a Slop Feature

The capstone — a sustained slop narrative, or a trailer plus its promotional cuts, committed to one story, one visual language and one genre for its full runtime, plus the director's statement that explains the commitment

Due: 10 May 2027 · Weight: 50%

The brief#

Commit to one slop feature — one story, one visual language, one genre — and hold that commitment for its full runtime.

This is the assessment the rest of the semester has been rehearsing for, and it is not scored on runtime or on any single shot. It is scored on whether you can hold a commitment across more than one piece of footage without it drifting. One impressive clip does not satisfy this brief. A trailer with sharp visual language followed by promotional cuts that quietly abandon it — different narrator cadence, different colour grade, a tell that vanishes halfway through — fails the actual test, whatever any individual clip looks like in isolation.

Choose a genre and a slop aesthetic deliberately, not by accepting whatever a model handed you on the first render: decide which tells belong to your feature (a specific voiceover cadence, a specific way faces or logos misbehave, a specific too-smooth camera move) and apply them on purpose, consistently, because a genre is defined by what it does reliably, not by what one lucky render did once. Sustained coherence is the hard part precisely because it is invisible when it works and obvious the moment it slips.

What you submit#

One of:

• a single continuous narrative piece, 3–5 minutes, telling one story start to finish, or
• a trailer (60–90 seconds) plus at least two linked promotional cuts (a character piece, a behind-the-scenes bit, a teaser — your call) that all visibly belong to the same feature

Either way, submit a director’s statement (500–800 words) alongside the work: name the one story, the one visual language, and the one genre you chose, and say which decision you were most tempted to break and why you didn’t (or, if you did break it somewhere, say where and whether that was a mistake or a deliberate exception).

The marking: block above weights sustained coherence above single-shot craft — a rough feature that holds its commitment for the whole runtime beats a polished one that only holds it for the trailer.