i’m not interested in filmmaking as a career, but i’ve always enjoyed dabbling in it

i’ll describe some of the stuff i’ve done (and make it sound much better than it actually was)

i’m not knowledgable on film at all, but it’s just fun to write and shoot and edit things

i can’t show any of it since i don’t want to dox the participants. and because i don’t feel like texting them out of the blue to ask for consent

some of it is straight up gone forever too, since i accidentally got my drive wiped about two years ago

i wrote and directed a sketch called “Interview” that isn’t great...at all. but i had a lot of fun with the process since it was semi-fleshed out

i got to use nice cameras, had shotgun mics, a handheld dolly, and bought costumes for it

i wrote it by giving the actors in it the concept, and having them improvize dialogue for a few minutes. then i watched the footage back and narrowed down an actual script based on what worked during the improv (and added a lot of my own stuff)

the premise of the sketch was that a guy was interviewing someone for a job, but the applicant turned out to be an impoverished clown, and it was gradually revealed that the interviewer was like, racist against clowns?

it probably has hints of being problematic but there was literally no intention or points to make out of it from me. it was just silly

there were gags where he asked if he could touch the clown’s hair, said his nose was big, assumed his name was Jojo when it was just Joe, etc.

and what happens is it progressively gets more uncomfortable and tense until the clown confronts him about being “unprofessional”

and then the guy flips out and says something like “*I’M* UNPROFESSIONAL? YOU’RE DRESSED AS A CLOWN!”

when he says “clown” he reaches out and honks the clown’s nose. i added a little horn honk sound effect in post but it was so subtle i wonder if people didn’t really notice

it then escalates and ends to where the clown punches him out cold

i wrote another short called “Math Tutor” which was about a guy tutoring a failing algebra student and getting mad because she kept going on her phone and ignoring him. it had a lot of camera fuggery in it that wasn’t for the best:

i had a bunch of different angles in it, but it was unfitting and messy considering how much of a nothing the short’s premise was

(the clown sketch was just two cameras generically filling the frame for each person in it, though there were some snap zooms)

i tried like, tracking shots, rotating around people, POV angles, top down, whip pans...and some point there was greenscreen and slo-mo used? it was a pretty bad little film and it took like three days to shoot (partly because i accidentally had the mic turned off the first day)

the guy playing the tutor was wearing a tux on the second day we shot because he was coming from some event and didn’t have time to change, so i put in a throwaway line where she was like “wait, why are you wearing a tux?” and he sighs and goes “...it doesn’t matter”

i also wrote a thing with someone where it was a parody of Punk’d except all the pranks were lame as shit and just aimed at random people instead of celebs. i remember i was in my brief nu-metal phase (don’t ask) so there was a lot of very bad music soundtracking it

the prank was that there was a guy just standing outside drinking coke from a solo cup (which is kinda funny in its absurdity, i guess) but he finds out it’s been replaced with DIET coke and gets extremely pissed

i don’t remember what else happens, but i think it ended with the host (who wasn’t even attempting to be Ashton) beating the shit out of him with a full backpack

i remember it was super funny when writing it (and was like, twice as long) but it didn’t come across onscreen at all

another thing i did was a short back when fidget spinners were popular. it was like a spotlight about a ‘professional fidget spinner’ who acted like he was a pro athlete. i remember shooting a lot of slo-motion b-roll of him spinning it in different poses

i ‘interviewed’ him for like 10 minutes and then edited the best parts down into 2 minutes. i remember he said something like “practice makes perfect....not really, practice makes you as good as you can be” and something about the way he said it was very funny to me

another thing i did (last thing i’ll talk about in this thread) was a short film for english class called “What We Learned In English” or something. it wasn’t necessarily but might’ve been extra credit? i forget

there were a lot of funny-ish moments (at the time) in it. all of the things we ‘learned’ were just things that devolved into chaos and people getting beat up

like my teacher used to get mad about people recycling bottles in the paper only bin, so the guy in the video said...

...”one thing i’ve learned: recycle is PAPER ONLY” and then he chucks a water bottle at someone’s head and then shoves them into the recycle bin

there was a scene where someone got pulled out of their desk and was slapped in the face so hard they fell on the floor, and people thought it was real because of how crisp the sound effect i used was

it’s becoming clear that i find random senseless violence funny

i skipped class the day it was shown on the projector. apparently the band kids thought it was funny but all the popular kids stared in confused, unamused silence