Bernice Afriyie | Arts Editor
Featured photo: Comic book fan and videogamer Veerender Jubbal reacts to Gamergate and racism in “Games are Garbage.” | Photo courtesy of Toronto Youth Shorts
Film is a unique artistic medium, as it has the potential to capture the spatial, temporal and textural features of other art forms. At the Toronto Youth Shorts Film Festival held on August 6 at Innis College, a variety of young filmmakers used their short films to highlight the collaborative potential of film.
“Say Cheese” by Brendan Lindsay is an animated short that follows the supernatural misadventures of a girl and her mouse.
“We had to bring the characters from design to storyboarding towards animation and then editing and post production,” says Lindsay.
“Going through the whole process presented a lot of challenges because we had to really be generalists and tackle modeling [and] rigging. For a 3D film, you have to model characters and create characters so you can animate them the way you want to animate them and of course the animation is a very time intensive process,” adds Lindsay.
“That’s actually what I enjoy doing the most so that’s what I have the most fun with and what I concentrated on. There are a lot of challenges being a generalist and having to deal with all these different creative and technical aspects to pull the film together. I found [it] challenging, especially creating a story within a two minute time frame.”
Carlee Diamond is another young filmmaker who focuses on the interplay between different art forms. Unlike “Say Cheese,” where animation seamlessly blends into film, Diamond’s documentary “Step 1” puts rap and hip hop under the scrutiny of a lens.
“My film is about a group of hip hop and cypher artists who come together on Sundays and celebrate the community that is hip hop culture in Toronto,” says Diamond.
“It’s called the Honour Roll right now, and I decided to make a film about it after going one time and just really feeling their energy and seeing the community they bring to each other.”
“Step 1” intimately looks at the musical process of these artists, using close ups, long shots, sound and lighting to accentuate their rhythm and tone.
Diamond attributes the documentary’s success to the talent of her subjects.
“The guys made it a lot easier, they even had ideas as we were going. They definitely have bigger visions than you’d expect. They really are all-around artists and the way they presented themselves was of being an artist. So filming other artists was, to be honest, a way easier experience than I expected,” says Diamond.
Like Diamond, Peter Yamashita uses his documentary “Gamers are Garbage” to draw attention to comics and their positive and negative potential. “Gamers are Garbage” follows Yamashita’s good friend Veerender Jubbal as he discusses his love for comics, video games and social media and his desire to see himself reflected in them.
“I use social media a lot, especially Twitter,” says Yamashita. “I also love the gaming community a lot and I love geek culture and everything about it but Veerender is a good example of how geek culture is really aggressive and toxic. If you haven’t heard, for the past two years he’s been harassed by them specifically in regards to a hashtag called Gamergate and they photoshopped one of his selfies and used it to falsely accuse him for terrorism. This is something that a lot of people face, but not to this extent, and I just thought that I wanted to share that message with people and just say that this is what happens on social media. It can happen to everyone, even this man from Brampton.”
“Gamers are Garbage” also shows the explorative possibilities of social media and comics.
“Veerender’s one of my closest friends now and without social media, that relationship never would have happened. Social media in itself is a good outlet for people with mental disabilities or people who are really introverted. It gives them a space where they don’t physically need to be around people but can still be able to communicate,” says Yamashita.
By documenting Jubbal’s experiences with social media, his documentary opens up conversations of intertextuality and accessibility.
When it came to visually representing comics in “Gamers are Garbage,” Yamashita discusses some of the difficulties he faced.
“It was really challenging,” admits Yamashita, “especially trying to take that sort of style and bring it into the film, because Veerender occasionally talks about specific comic frames or events in comics so I wanted to go back to the comic itself, back to where everything first started and screencap it and somehow translate it into film as static images.
“So my director of photography, Sean Gaynor, went into After Effects and broke down that image one by one for each layer and animated them in very subtle ways and that’s how we tried to translate it from there.”
Yamashita also references Ms. Marvel, an important comic introduced to him through social media that he says talks a lot about representation and internalized racism.
“Right now an issue that matters to me is whitewashing and represent-Asian,” continues Yamashita. “It sounds like representation but how it is spelt is represent-Asian because I don’t see a lot of Asian representation or films [or] media about Asian stories being told by Asian people. I’m half-Japanese and Veerender is South Asian, so I thought that this would be a great opportunity for me to actually do something that I want to see.”
Toronto Youth Shorts featured 44 films from local talent and concluded with a juried and audience choice award show. Shout-out to York’s Kristina Wong, whose film “Tidal Waves” won the audience choice and industry choice in fiction awards.
What you should add to this little circlejerk article of yours is that Veerender was recently found out to be part of a group where they would harass and dox people they disagree with. Also, the maniac dreams of killing white people and enjoys video games because where he can. The guy is a complete monster.