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
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.
My friend Shyam Valera and I acted together for the first time. Here is a scene from that thing.
I stress that this is rough, that the music is temporary, and the colour is not final. But hopefully it can convey the tone of the film which I’ll upload if it ends up being any good.
Clip set up: Shyam and I are mutually ‘jinxed’, which I take far too seriously. He cares more about the fact that we have to SING in a talent show that day, a fact that I have only just realized now
We finished the first day of filming Jinx. And it got ‘hectic’.
More from the shooting of our new short.
We couldn’t sing at him, and we couldn’t ignore the ridiculousness. The internet was our only way to call out the grade 11 kid acting *way* too cool.
More video from the set of Jinx!
In retrospect, they had to pack a lot of things and people into that beemer. But we were wasting gasoline.
If you don’t like reading words, you’ll love this description:
Started shooting a new short today. Here is some extra footage.
