Some people just know how to make cinema.
‘Back to Solitude’, a short film by Joschka Laukeninks.
Wow. I’ve thought a lot about cinematography and lighting over the last couple of days, and how to raise the quality bar on our projects here at Dunya. This film not only delivers on the promise of beautiful imagery in a DSLR/digital-filmmaking world, but takes everything to the next level, from music to casting to structure and beyond.
Five days of shooting, six months of post-production, and some quintessential überdeutsch narrator voice that almost rivals Werner Herzog.
Watch this film. Love it. Then check out Joschka’s Vimeo page for another short and a bunch of video goodness.
The Oscars are tonight, but let’s be honest— you haven’t seen all the movies. It’s all good though, Shyam and I have you covered with all the categories you can beat your friends in, along with perfectly acted excerpts of each performance. Enjoy.
And since the Oscars are tonight, please spread this on facebook asap!! Thanks :)
New Episode of Overshare is up! In which I talk about the most important event in global news today: a 3D documentary starring Justin Bieber.
Please, click to share it on facebook or click here to share it on Twitter!
This one was one of the hardest to do— still not as hard as ep. 2, but getting started on ep. 5 here was supertough— I still haven’t been able to escape the weekly fear of completely failing! It all works out to a certain extent once it’s edited, colour graded, and the sound is mixed, but there is no indication of coherence before that at all. Which is scary, because you only know if it’s worth of putting up in the last 5 minutes of a confusing, repetitive 15-hour task, and a full university course load+a couple of jobs make 15 hours (plus time to do Buddy Guys, our sketch series) a week really valuable and hard to find.
I think I might not have the fear of horrible-ness for next week’s video though, as I already know my subject. NOW the fear is that I might be so comfortable that it isn’t funny. Which creates enough discomfort for it to be good. I overthink most things if you couldn’t tell :)
Overall I can see a lot of place for improvements, but a week ago I wouldn’t have been able to do this in the same amount of time! (Well, I didn’t :P)
This afternoon I decided to just go ahead and finish up a short film that we shot on a whim this February. 1.5 hours turned into 7 (editing is the one thing in life I can do with no sense of time, laziness, or anything but joy, really) and here it is!
Jinx. It’s a short film that Shyam Valera and I wrote for an assignment in high school: make a film with no dialogue. So we did, but were exempt from handing it in because we were organizing our 3rd-annual city-wide film festival, so about a year later, when I was finally a video camera owner, we decided it was time to make something and this was just sitting there as a fun little idea.
So we shot during Olympic break (the Olympics took our school’s busses, so class was out) with help from Kevin Lam, Mannan Ahmed, and Dan Johnson. Total writing time ~2/3 hours, total shooting time ~8/9 hours, total editing/colour/visual effects (my 1st ever VFX shot is in there! See if you can catch it :D)/post time ~30 hours, I’d guess.
I hope everyone enjoys it— it’s not much, and there are definitely glaring flaws, but if you cracked a smile then I think it was a success. Let me know in the comments.
Thanks for watching!
-Kashif
PS I JUST WATCHED (half of) WILLOW SMITHS WHIP-MY-HAIR SONG AND I TOTALLY GET WHY IT’S A BIG DEAL NOW
First teaser trailer is out for The Social Network!
I’m still super excited for this David Fincher-directed, Aaron Sorkin-written movie about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Eisenberg seems to have the Zuckerberg voice down in a way that sounds right but isn’t spot-on enough for the movie to be as unbearable as listening to Mark for two and a half hours.
Justin Timberlake manages to sound the best, even with just one line “You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.”
I would say this is also an explanation of why Inception is my most anticipated film of Summer 2010.
“Look what movies are coming out this summer: Sex and the City 2 (sequel to a movie based on a TV show based on a book based on newspaper articles), Iron Man 2 (sequel to a movie based on a 2nd-tier comic book), Jonah Hex (based on a 5th-tier comic book), The A-Team (based on a campy 80s TV action show), Macgruber (based on a series of TV comedy skits based on a campy 80s TV action show) Robin Hood (beyond being basically a Bible story in terms of freshness, it’s also for all intents and purposes a sequel to the film Gladiator), Step Up 3D (sequel to a sequel… in 3D!), Toy Story 3 (sequel to a sequel… in 3D!), Shrek Forever (sequel to the sequel to the sequel to a movie based on fairy tales and fart jokes), Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (based on the sequel to a computer game), The Karate Kid (remake of an 80s movie that spawned several sequels, starring the sequel to Will Smith), Ramona and Beezuz (based on children’s books which have already inspired filmic adaptations), The Last Airbender (based on an animated TV series), Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (based on a graphic novel), Nanny McPhee Returns (sequel to a movie based on a series of books), Piranha 3D (remake of a movie that was based on ripping off Jaws), Predators (you know, like the movie Predator, but plural!), Dinner for Schmucks (remake of a French film from a decade ago), Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore (sequel to a movie called Cats and Dogs that I’d never heard of until I Googled it so I could write this). That’s not counting films whose plots are just lazy retreads of previous films. And that’s also not counting the Marmaduke movie.”
- Joe Mathlete, of Joe Mathlete Explains Marmaduke
They are the best, and they specialize in the ridiculous!
I can’t wait to get a chance to finish up this film, Jinx. The problem is that the longer I take, the higher the expectations rise, but it was all really just an excuse to hang out with some friends, which caused a lack of finesse in the filmmaking that’s drawing out the post-production process just to make it watchable.
A glasses-free Kevin Lam makes an appearance in this still. I say glasses-free because they were violently removed for him by a soccer ball moments before this shot. True story.
It is greater dawah when Muslims don’t have a particular Muslim theme.
