Filmed during a high school break, Stars is the second of my smartphone short films (and second film overall). I think my phone camera had an issue at the time, so I remember borrowing my brother’s phone for some scenes and my cousin’s phone for others, leaving either one of them phoneless for several hours a day.

The story behind this film is pretty straightforward. It’s based on a written piece I wrote for my girl at the time. I struggle with verbally communicating my thoughts and feelings; I have to write everything down. I “bleed on the page” (as George Lucas calls it), and that’s more or less what happened here.

Other than it adding to the mood of the film and generally just looking aesthetically pleasing, my decision to shoot the movie as a black-and-white film was down to colour grading. I didn’t quite understand colour correction and grading at the time so I decided, hey, BAM! Slap on black-and-white, where the only colours that mattered were highlights and shadows. But that decision taught me to understand the symbiotic relationship between light and contrast, and the benefits associated with over-exposure as well as the pitfalls of under-exposure.
Just because 18-year-old me was probably just “too busy” to learn how to colour grade properly.

No fluff. No bluff. Just raw emotion narrated by yours truly…