Precision

A young Japanese girl jumps her way through time with a computer for a guide and unseen bosses assigning her recovery missions to deliver on. All while drinking heavily.

The end credits for this short film are a real problem in the bigger picture. Using comic book style stills, we see a punky Japanese girl with attitude facing off with robots, humans, dinosaurs and anyone else who wants to have a go with her. Although they are static images they have lots of attitude and energy and as cool as they looked I really wish they had not had been there because the only purpose they seemed to serve was to perfectly distill all the issues I had with the actual content of the film. It starts well as we have Merica Adams waking up with blood on her clothes, cool headphones and a gun in her hand. The potential is all there and, while the ideas in the background are interesting, the foreground is where all the issues are.

Firstly, the technical delivery hurts it. Visually the film is clearly limited by resources so that even cool shots don't look quite as good as they should. This is nothing compared to the poor sound quality, where the computer voice is very loud and clear while the on-screen character is echoed and hard to hear. The plot sees our feisty character drinking forbidden alcohol, discussing her last job and moving on with the next; it was written, shot and edited all in 48 hours which is impressive but unfortunately it shows and it looks less than professional and it doesn't work. In the lead role Abe has clearly been told just to be feisty and sexy and she tries her best but is working against the film – she needed help from the camera, from the soundtrack and from the material to make it work and in reality she is abandoned by all of that and left to try and pull faces and be as sassy as the flat dialogue lets her be; she is cute and I did like her as a character and would love to see her get another shot at it.

Precision has some nice ideas about it but unfortunately is killed by its own delivery. It must be repeated that it was made in a single weekend but still it has weaknesses in script, shots, sound and generally suffers from a lack of resource to deliver something better. The end credits and their cool images of who Adams is only serve to highlighting how very far from that the film actually is. That said, I saw enough potential to be curious about the film and found that a follow-up is being made at the moment and hopefully the increased resourced and removal of arbitrary limits (48 hours to make) will mean that the end product will more resemble the graphic art at the end and less of this original short.