Movie director and producer Stanley Kubrick once said, “Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.” As it happens, for many amateur filmmakers, a billiards room can provide the perfect milieu for bringing that camera and engaging in some cinematic and photographic experimentation.
The five recent billiards short films below are wildly different in theme, plot (or lack thereof), pace, dialogue, budget, and ultimately, viewer pleasure, but they have all been hand-picked by me to feature in this blog post because of their shared connection in focusing on billiards as a way to explore a new camera, some new software, a shiny new toy.
Trick Shot
In 2015, Canon USA unveiled its new EOS C300 Mark II, a feature-rich HD motion picture camera. To introduce the new technology to the world, they funded the production of Trick Shot, a 13-minute commercial that masquerades as a billiards short film about a family of traveling grifters. In the ad – I mean, movie – a father-son-daughter team hustle a roughneck and his gang of goons in a game of 8-ball. The scam appears to fail when the daughter scratches on the 8-ball, but that gaffe, it turns out, was part of a larger con. Actress Danielle Andrade does most the pool-shooting. It’s clear she can’t play but then this film was never really about pool. The full movie is available to watch here, as well as a behind-the-scenes feature that clarifies the camera is the real star of this film.
Billard Raum
Like Trick Shot, this three-minute German film shares a similar mission of using billiards as a way to showcase a camera’s potential. Created in 2011 by Afif El-Hadi, the director/cameraman used a Nikon D7000, along with three different Nikkor lenses, to create a movie, burdened by an overuse of visual effects, about a man practicing a game of 9-ball. The most memorable part of the film is the inclusion of the songs “Extreme Ways” (Moby), “Fever Dream” (Tyler Bates), and “Wings” (Martin Todsharow).
The Break
Using a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, British director Azeem Mustafa shot The Break in 2015. The four-minute billiards short film pits Detective Rajat Basu against career criminal Sebastien Duchamps in a private snooker room. Unfortunately, aside from the opening break, the table goes unused, and instead serves as backdrop to a feet-only (?) fight scene between two on-screen martial artists, Kamran Kam and Wilfried Tah. Calling the sequence the “best fight scene [he’s] every produced,” Mustafa cites credits the Blackmagic with allowing him to “push the cinematic feel of the film.”[1] The movie is available to watch here.
Pool Hall
This two-minute, black-and-white ode to dark, smoky pool halls is not the standard fare from Tex Crowley, head honcho of Texomatic Pictures, a video production company that caters to the trucking industry. But, Crowley shot Pool Hall in 2013, both to reminisce about his days shooting pool in North Texas, and, presumably, to showcase his skills using a Canon T2i / 550D with Magic Lantern 2.3 and editing with Adobe Premier Pro CC. The movie is available to watch here.
Chalked
Don’t be too harsh on Chalked, a conceptual project that takes the same 30-second billiards scene and shows it in three variations of cinema genre: silent movie, comedy, and western. The film, created by Jake Moore, while he was a freshman in college, shows an individual experimenting with sound, color, lighting, and visuals, to mimic these familiar genres. Along with many more recent projects, the film is available on the website of his video production company, Red Bell Central.
[1] https://officemustafa.wordpress.com/2015/04/01/the-break-martial-arts-action-film/
