Production

Production, one of the most fun part of this project. Production is making something, the process of realizing ideaas, sailing the ships met to be sailed, its almost heart toucing for any thinker to see thier ideaas get made so was it for me.

The day of the filming had arrived. After waiting days and days of meticulous planning and forming, i took my cast (my cousin) fueled by sheer determination, setting up shots, adjusting angles, and ensuring every scene was perfect. As the night wore on, fatigue set in, but we kept pushing forward, knowing we had to see it through. By the time we finished at 12 AM, we were exhausted, yet there was an undeniable sense of achievement, like all the hard work, the late hours, and the challenges had truly paid off. But my cousin also demanded that I take him to a Pizza dinner the next day so that was also something.

Costume and props

Costume

Someone suggested to me that I should use a T shirt and sweat pants as the costume to portray regular use cloths, but that made me question my own self? and ask the question which all great thinker have asked themselves at least once, WHY? like why should I use that dressing used in every Hollywood film and media and partly inspired by European culture in a project in which am trying to represent the emotional instability and mental health issue of a Pakistani Teenager, representing and conveying the message that these issues are not just restricted to a certain race or color but is a world wide issue, thus by pure judgment and logic I had chosen a shalwar kameez as my costume due to its cultural significance in Pakistan and the fact it is used as a common ware among many middle class Pakistani house hold.

Diary    

One of the props I used is a Diary , the purpose of this prop was to portray the scene of diary writing, research have proven it is way easier to reveal your feeling to a diary than a real person, thus following that study I used a diary to reveal what the mc is going through, to help audience understand the circumstance and get the context for the upcoming scene. I didn't want it to be too flashy or too cutesy as the life of my mc is not all sunshine and rainbow so at the end of the day I chose black cover plain diary.

Natural lighting

As for the lighting, I wanted to keep it as real and natural as possible, so most of the time that lighting was kept natural lighting coming from the window, this helped create a clean and consumable texture of the media, not to heavy on the eyes and not to dim that its genuinely gets hard to see.

ACTING AND FILMING

Acting and filming was one of the most fun i had since ages, of course I didn't act myself but it was fun directing my cousin on how to act and filming, trying different camera angels and seeing how it affects each frmae.

For acting I directed my cousin to act sad and devoid of emotion to fit his character and surprisingly he nailed that part, but everyone knows when things seems easy it means the hard part has yet to bang on your door. And than it hit, the part of the creepy smile at the end, for some reason my cousin almost forgot how to smile , it was soooo frustrating that i almost bashed my head against the wall , almost , don't worry no heads were hurt, and after 8 retakes we were able to produce a barely satisfactory creepy smile.

As for filming I used my trusty Samsung A35 at 1080p 60fps , I could have gone with 4k 30 fps as well but I thought I would like my project more smooth than detailed and 1080p is not that bad so I choose 1080p 60 fps.

    My Samsung A35