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A surreal short film explores loneliness through YouTube culture: The dark side of online fame and v



ALI: How did that lead you into the film world and making features and shorts? And how did you make the transition? Is that through studying, or were you exposed at an early stage, watching films either on TV or the cinema? How did that begin?




A surreal short film explores loneliness through YouTube culture




ALI: And they start off as very lonely characters, and then by working in this boring, mundane environment and space. But they find maybe their passion for life through these competitions. So, while watching this underground mysterious world of the filing arena and competition, it felt, while I was watching, it felt like a surreal version of Fight Club. So, perhaps here, I might ask you, apart from your lived experience and working in similar office space and environments, was there any film inspirations or literary works that inspired elements of the story?


Vesak is a Buddhifuturist fiction built in a real-time game engine. The film is based on factual events of Buddhism Festivals that are reimagined in an alternative history. By developing a stylistic Techno-Chan aesthetic, the film explores the emergent relationships between technology and ritual against the backdrop of animism, nature, and quantified spirituality. Vesak is premiering online with the film and culture platform Nowness.


For me the most compelling aspect of the Fiction and Entertainment program was the interdisciplinary discourse that helped establish a comprehensive knowledge across a range of storytelling mediums such as animation, game design, VR, and short films. This knowledge is developed in weekly discussion between high profile instructors, guests, and students along with technical skills workshops. I believe if someone, regardless of their background, wants to explore cutting-edge forms of entertainment through new technologies of storytelling, speculation, and world building then Fiction and Entertainment is the best program to put that desire into practice."


"As part of the Fiction and Entertainment program, I made the short hybrid documentary The Endless Market. The film is based around the design of a fictional tower that forms an archive of stories from an important market in Mumbai that is now threatened by gentrification. My architectural approach to the project gave me a different perspective towards a particular place, its people, and its culture, but it was with the guidance of Liam Young and Alexey Marfin that I learnt how to speculate and visualize an alternate world within this existing context. In the year-long course I have learnt and developed a completely new pallet of skills. The curriculum gave us the opportunity to learn from and receive feedback at every stage of the process from some of the great professionals in the industry. Furthermore, it enabled us to make connections and work with them in the future. After graduation I worked with production designer Alex McDowell on a worldbuilding project imagining the city of tomorrow and the urban possibilities of driverless cars. This program opened up innumerable possibilities for me and definitely added a great deal to my skillset. I then got a compositing internship with the visual effects studio Framestore before getting full time compositing jobs at some of the worlds most significant post production studios, first at MPC and now with DNEG."


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