“The Tennis Shoes” Awarded Second Prize
My Pasadena city college Photo 26A Filmmaking class final project “The Tennis Shoes” which was selected for the closing night of the festival was awarded a second place diploma and a bag of useless goodies. (Actually there are few editing programs that might be useful but, trusting my guts, I just don’t want to go through the hassle of adding new stuff on my computer that might later mess up the whole system.) Anyways it was a great night filled with few good movies and I felt so overwhelmed with all the positive vibe coming from the kind of audience that I personally wasn’t expecting to become fond of my dark story.

Theme and Storyline

“The Tennis Shoes” revolves around a young guy portrayed by talented Arbi Markar who learns of his Tennis Partner’s passing and rushes to his home to comfort his family, however he is confronted with a postmortem ceremony that pushes him off to metaphysical limits.

The story has a surreal theme and is probably the result of the pressure and pain of me losing friends in the aftermath of the air crush a few months earlier in a flight. The entire film was shot within four days. I edited a longer version but for the purpose of our class I made a final five minutes cut which excludes some of my most favorite scenes. We were busted through the process of making this film a few times including twice in the Burbank cemetery, but I think the gorilla style shooting is my favorite and I don’t really see myself paying for location in the future. If you are interested to see this film please go to the videos in my website and there should be a link to my Vimeo page for this version.

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“Field of View” wins first prize.

Made by my classmate Christa Berndt, this film is a rich cinematic experience.

The first prize winner was a poetic, warm and personal film made by another talented classmate Christa Berndt called “Field of View” which I really wish I could watch again sometimes. The film was made with fluid camera movements and dreamy like montage that reminded me of Terrance Malick’s works. Beside the two of us all the other shorts were pretty much engaging and like I always say; art is subjective and winning or becoming first or second doesn’t mean the same as it does in sports. Yeah so that’s about it.