Tick Tock: Director's Comments

Tick Tock was definitely one of the smaller productions, by far the smallest of short films, but that doesn't make it any less meaningful or significant to my team and I. The film is based on the butterfly effect of student suicide, how all the small things in a student's life can lead to fatal consequences.

Tick Tock is available to watch on YouTube

The film hit rather close to home for me as student suicide rates are quite high where I live - Hong Kong. Worse yet I know countless friends who have suicidal thoughts on a regular basis but yet refuse to seek help, even though all it would take is a tiniest bit of stress or aggravation to send them over the edge. Knowing this, I wanted to create a story to highlight this issue and hopefully help those who need helping.

This shot was particularly terrifying as the winds were strong, yet I actually had to stand with my feet off the edge of the building with the cameraman, in a relatively unstable posture, inches away from me getting the overhead shot.

I call this the smallest production to date as it only took a few short shoots and a bare-bones crew to actually put together this piece. There was a hefty time crush by the executive producers to get the final film done hence why the production itself only took about 2 months. It was unfortunate that we had to sacrifice some of the creative ideas in the pursuit of speed, but all-in-all, the production turned out just as expected on paper as it did on screen.

The biggest hurdle for the shoot was actually the shear vastness of locations we had to use. As student filmmakers, we could not afford a car or van to take us to our locations, so we had to rely on public transport and the walkability of Hong Kong. On the main shoot day (yes, we wrapped principle photography within one day), we started out in Kennedy Town, the Western side of Hong Kong Island, and wrapped in the evening in Causeway Bay, with shots planned in Sheung Wan and Admiralty along the way. Ambitious? Yes. But did we pull it off? Damn right we did, with time to spare even.

I would transition in and out of actor-crew modes as I was cast as well as crew on this project in the aim to keep the production as small as possible.

The drone shots were also a bit fiddly as one could imagine. Having to navigate a drone on the streets of Hong Kong between buildings, tram lines, footbridges and double-decker buses was no easy task. There were many instances where we thought we were going to actually lose the drone entirely as the signal kept dropping out and it would drift towards all the skywards obstacles presented to us. Luckily for us, the drone made it out of the shoot in one piece, probably to a great sigh of relief from the executive producers.

With all that being said, this production was an absolute blast to produce and held a very strong meaning to many who watched it, which as a writer and director, made me very proud.