SYNOPSIS:

A physicist trapped in a kebab van works desperately to undo the irreparable damage she has done to her world, having done something to apparently break it. She works at a holographic display, searching for something, as a Dark Force seemingly taunts her, attempting to convince her to let it in. After she attempts to escape to other realities, only to find them just as broken, she gives in to the Dark Force and returns to her reality — a reality of grief that she has been trying to escape.

Starring: Lizzie Ballinger
Written, directed, shot and edited by Cem Bilici

 

The concept for Kebab Van came about after I decided I wanted to make a short film with a real actor — as my last two pieces were created in Unreal Engine — with a darker tone, as my previous films have been comedic in nature. I knew I wanted a horror element, and adding in mixed reality, Sci-Fi was also a natural given. Given I was working as a team of one, I also knew I had to keep the story contained. As I have the kebab van set for my upcoming web series, I decided to use that for this film with one actor.

I wrote an outline that would become the script of Kebab Van almost stream of consciousness, using the thoughts I’ve had on mixed reality and its possible impacts on humanity. Those thoughts swung to both the positive and negative — utopian and dystopian. I have absolutely no idea what that future — now looming ever closer with Meta, and Apple’s soon-to-be-released headset — will be, and I wanted the story to reflect that, even if metaphorically.

Mixed reality promises to be a great tool, but it could also be a way to escape reality — which in itself could be positive in moderation, or negative and addictive.

I also knew I wanted to incorporate machine learning into the process, so I used a tool called Voice.ai create the voice of the Dark Force, which I used in my previous Unreal Engine short. I also used ChatGPT to generate the newspaper articles apart from the main one, and Dall-E 2 to create the photo of the Physicist’s husband in the main article.

While it was still quite difficult shooting the film by myself, despite that I’d planned it to be very contained, I think it turned out really well. One of my main aims was to improve my VFX and work on new techniques and I learned a lot, especially using Fusion, as I worked in Davinci Resolve, and I learnt some more advanced chroma keying and compositing techniques. It’s still not 100%, I wasn’t able to really tune the colour grade and I wanted to make some backgrounds for the green screen portions in 3D and a few other effects, but I will still work those in to get it to the level that I want it to be at.