These are the films that are on my Collection of Shorts DVD and I was actually planning on selling them and hopefully making a few hundred bucks with it. As in to support myself with the new feature film, whatever little bit would help you know? But in the end, after thinking long and hard I said fuck it, free for all. I mean, what's a couple of hundred bucks worth, against all the people who are liable and able to see the films and what networking oppurtunities could come of it? So, I tried different video hosting sites, all with better quality and I did a test run and it looked great, but, you know.. fuck it, I went with YouTube because well, it's the place where the audience is the greatest. After many conversion tests, this is the result I could come up with. Most of the time it doesn't look (too) horrible. There's an option to watch them a bit smaller giving the original conversion quality, but YouTube always blows them up just a bit. Anyway, enough with the excuses...
I'd be curious to hear comments from you, as it's always interesting to hear how people react to certain things. Good or bad, don't worry about it. And enjoy!
Me at the IMDb.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1498460/
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch/v/vMjD8o5t1Vg[/video]
(2003, 16 min, s16mm)
This was my graduation film. I worked for a year on it. It played at film festivals and played on cable. Shot on super 16 mm and with a crew of professionals and non-professionals. The director of photography was a rather famous cinematographer from the Netherlands who shot many features and my sound recordist was also a professional who recorded features. The lead was a professional theatre actor who acted for the first time in front of a camera. The young kid was a non professional who made a big impression on us at the casting call. Family and friends helped out on several jobs such as catering and I produced it myself. The total budget was 8,000 euros, but we got alot of stuff for free, such as camera rentals and our soundguy had his own equipment. Editing was done on an Avid and it was sound mixed by a leading Dutch mixer. The DVD version is Dolby Surround 2.0.
Being that it was a student short, the budget was able to be so low, if we would've had to pay everyone their usual fee and had not gotten the Kodak stock as a student discount, it would've been around 75,000 euros.
part 1
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch/v/p5ZAxhKznx4[/video]
part 2
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch/v/NydQs7kDKkc[/video]
(2005, 13 min, miniDV)
Shot for 12 euros. Wrote it the night before shooting when my original idea fell through. Asked everyone I was planning on using to turn up anyway. Shot it the next morning, went back to the edit the same afternoon. Made a rough cut before falling to sleep dead tired (hadn't slept the night before shooting, I was too busy coming up with an actual idea to shoot!). Slept for twelve hours. Made a second cut, fine tuning most of it and it was done. That's the cut you still see to this day and that's actually the film that won me the 2005 Jury Prize for Best Short Film of the Netherlands of that year. Shit is crazy sometimes, but I have o say, it's one of my personal favorites. For all it's technical limitations (lighting, occasional wonkyness), it's got great heart and soul and I wouldn't want to change a frame. This was even sold to national television to air three times in a year. I lived for a year off this film almost!
part 1
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch/v/m56k26EbnWs[/video]
part 2
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch/v/r-9uZHAWT4M[/video]
(2006, 9 min, High Definition)
Then I got asked by a small company (the owners of the videostore I shot IT HASN'T HAPPENED YET in) to shoot a couple of shorts for them. They organize exhibitions for artists and they'd just started a tv program on a local tv station and if I would be interested to shoot a few shorts for them. My own scripts, whatever I wanted. I'd get a few hundred bucks budget, a camera to use and their computer to edit it on. I had just broken up with my a group of filmmakers (we wanted to start our own film company) and this oppurtunity came at the right time. But still, very limited means and practically on no budget, very restrained. So I chose to do a few things I hadn't done before. A situational comedy.
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch/v/HcLGwVmJtPw[/video]
2006, 13 min, High Definition)
This was a longer screenplay that I had the foolishness to think I could shoot in one night, but unfortunately things didn't work out the way I wanted and we couldn't shoot a second night, so I had to re-write extensively during the shoot as we were actually fighting time before dawn would set in.
part 1
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch/v/-_00SncDy2o[/video]
part 2
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch/v/aJCwLUO8r_0[/video]
(2006, 16 min, High Definition)
And I also wanted to try my hand a little bit at genre conventions and then again, not. So here's the THE MAN WHO tried TO KILL!! If you've seen IT HASN'T HAPPENED YET, you could also view it as an unofficial sequel. Watch it to know what I mean by that.
part 1
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch/v/n3GjhYXgWxE[/video]
part 2
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch/v/WAmDSv7p3lQ[/video]
And finally, coming soon... SEARCHING FOR SCORSESE. A documentary.
Here's the film YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/BarisAzman, the MySpace http://www.myspace.com/barisazman and I'm on Facebook (just search under my full name).
