Check.

[lemanya]

My final exam for the semester is tomorrow, and I can't wait for it to be over. Then I'm going brunching with my uni mates to celebrate no more classes for like, two months. Then I have to pick up my cake for my birthday celebration tomorrow night. And then my birthday week and a half will be over.

In the mean time, I'm sharing this video.

Last year, my primary school best friend (L) rang me and basically said "I'm going to make a movie, want to help?" and I said yes. We teamed up with a guy we both know who has the craziest sense of humour and good writing skills and got a script written called Octopus House. It's a murder mystery set in the 1920's involving a vampire, a zombie, a rebellious teenager, a pirate, drugs, a cyborg and octopus demons. It was pretty fantastic. Unfortunately, due to time constraints of just about everyone involved, including the cast, who were also friends of ours, the project was put on the backburner.

So late last year L rang me up again and said "you want to be in on our other movie? this one is shorter, so it will actually get done". I said yes. The plan was to submit it to the Tropfest festival, which is a festival of short films celebrating local talent. We never expected it to get anywhere in terms of winning (or making any kind of finalist place) but we did it nonetheless as a learning experience.

So about four days into January, me, L, the writer (P) and another guy we know who specialises in computer technology (T) got together and filmed this over three days. It's called Chester's Tale. It's about a guy (played by P) who meets a Tortoise named Chester at a lake who plays chess with passers by. He ends up being stalked by Chester until his untimely death at the hands of this ceramic tortoise.

L directed it, with me in her ear saying "oh let's do this, and this angle, and hang on a minute, it's a tortoise, shouldn't the angle of the camera be lower to ground and looking up?" (by this stage we were tired and were not prepared to go back and refilm that which we hadn't shot from the correct angle. oops). P is the main guy, and T is the guy in the beginning playing chess. He also appears in the cafe, in the booth behind P, editing the previous days' footage and looking after our bags.

You can't see me at all in the film, but not only did I backseat direct, but I did all the moving for the stop-motion scenes(and got horrifically sunburnt for it), but that's my handwriting on all those post-its, and I was standing in the bushes at the cafe lifting up the tortoise to the window. Among a whole bunch of other things. Though I wish I had a say in the editing process (I just wasn't available on those days) because there was a fair amount I thought 'oh I would have done it another way'.

I hope you like it. It's a bit wierd, but we did honestly have explanations (such as why the main character was in a box to begin with) that due to the requirements of the short video, had to be cut from the final product. Also, we know it's amateur, but we learnt a lot, and when we get to putting together ninja mountain quest this coming New Year, we'll know what we should and should not do :)

Enjoy!

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It just occured to me that our names are in the credits, so the anonymity in this post is for naught. Oh well.