*** Warning *** Contains heavy Spoilers ***
The beginning of the movie is absolutely exciting - smooth camera moves, everything just fits together and creates a thrilling atmosphere.
Unfortunately the following dialogue scene flattens out the tension. The audience already knows, who the assassin is and during the whole scene everybody stands on fixed positons and is filmed with fixed camera (except the wide angle).
One of the most beautiful shots is that one on the lake with the fog and the blue light - absolutely breathtaking (it's an establishing shot, hello Vector). But then again fixed camera in the following dialogue scene.
The scene in the cabin, when Prince Arden finds the dead Belora is the weakest of the whole movie in my opinion, because the acting didn't reflect the severeness of the situation and the lighting is very dull. Some bright light rays from outside coming through the slots in the walls would have helped alot.
As mentioned already, the sword fighting scene is too slow. Speeding it up by a factor of 2 in the post and/or faster editing with more different viewing angles would be a big improvement. What I really liked in that scene was the cloth and the chains hanging down from the ceiling, that created a great atmosphere.
The music fits perfectly, it supports the action without being too exaggerated. Amazing job.
The costumes are excellent and like Cheetah mentioned, the actors did a very good job bringing them to life.
Camera work, lighting and color grading are on a professional level, I really liked the shallow focus. Only in some cases I would have liked a more "active" camera, because sometimes the camera didn't even pan to follow the action, instead it was fixed like a rock.
Now to the story - what is the point in introducing characters with a pretty complex background story only to watch them being killed one after another within 40 minutes? Is this some sort of special dutch black humor? It's not that I would need happy ends in every movie, but in this case it doesn't make sense to me. First a whole universe is being created and then it's being destroyed within minutes.
The other aspect is the lack of emotional depth. I don't want a soap opera, but Bitter Lake just couldn't catch me, there was no character I could identify myself with and everytime I started to like a specific character he got killed anyways, so at the end I was sitting there, shrugging my shoulders like "Okay... well... the evil brotherhood wins, game over."
So, to sum it up, Bitter Lake is an excellent promo video for Clockwork Creatures Studios with mostly amazing camera, lighting and music, but couldn't convince me on the story side.
