Sexual racism encounter #74

On Grindr:

Him: I’m Italian Canadian. What’s your ethnicity?
Me: (hesitantly) I’m Chinese. May I ask how old you are?

Five seconds later, the conversation disappears. I’ve been blocked.

Watch me “act”!

Here’s the rough cut of the first short film I wrote and directed, titled Stay.  As I posted in the comments (but not in the description… I should probably do that sometime), the rough cut was filmed first to submit to a film festival (the Vancouver Queer Film Festival) in hopes of buying me more time so I could make the film with Nelson and Minh. It was shot in one afternoon and edited quickly vs. the real film, which was shot in three days. I think Nelson and I did only a couple rehearsals before shooting too, both on the day of.  It’s imperfect and it really is rough and I wish I could’ve acted a bit better (but I’m not an actor so I excuse myself), but what’s there is there, and it’s not all bad.

Enjoy me half-naked!

Stay on youtube

I uploaded my short film Stay on youtube yesterday and it’s already gotten 476 views!  I knew gay films on youtube were popular but I didn’t think it would be that popular that fast.

Anyway, enjoy!  (if you haven’t already seen it)

Cure(d) is finally done!

My latest short film, Cure(d), was finished a while back but there were some slight synching problems with the video and audio so I had to fix it quickly for the upcoming world premiere of it at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival.

Now, I don’t consider myself to be a professional editor by any means, but I have worked with Final Cut many times and I know my way around the program.  That being said, it can take friggin’ forever to render clips sometimes, and it doesn’t help that staring wide-eyed at the screen to make sure words are matching with the actors’ lips can make you go crazy too (“Looks like it’s synched… wait… yes… wait, maybe not… Fuck.”).  At the same time though, I’m glad I got to edit this film, as I can very particular about what I want which I think can be difficult to work with.

Anyhoo, it’s done.  Thank god.  I had exporting problems, which is, I think, one of the worst problems one can encounter while editing because 1. it takes about 30 – 40 minutes on average for it to export and 2. you can only tell if something’s wrong after it’s done and you play back the file.  Otherwise, you’re stuck waiting for a long time, believing what you’re exporting is going to be fabulous, only to find out there’s no audio on your film (which happened).  Argh.  I may have to go back to Langara and export the damn file again because it doesn’t seem to be playing back on my computer, despite the fact that I was able to burn it on the Mac once the export was done (and the DVD worked fine too).

Good thing I had my book there with me to read (Dan Savage’s The Kid, which I recommend).  In the meantime, Cure(d) will be screening on Saturday August 20th at 9:30pm at the Granville 7 Theatres.  You can buy tickets to the Coast is Queer Program that my short film is in at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival website here:  http://www.queerfilmfestival.ca/viewfilm.php?fid=653

Hope to see you there!  Since I don’t really have a website (does anyone want to help design a website for me?), I’ll be posting updates about the film and anything related on either here or my myspace film page: http://www.myspace.com/aaronchanfilm

That’s all.  And here’s a still from the film, as a sneak peek.

from Cure(d)

10 Defining Moments of My Life (so far) — #8: Coming out to my mom

8.  I was trying to teach myself to play the guitar when my mom walked in and sat on the bed next to me.  Immediately, I knew she had something serious to talk about.  She looked at me and asked if I was gay.  I said yes, and already I could sense the tears waiting to be shed.  We had a long, long talk about it; she couldn’t seem to understand how I “became” gay.  She kept trying to make up excuses for it, but when I told her it was just who I am, she didn’t believe it.  Tears kept falling down my face, and some of them fell between the strings of the guitar and on the frets.  Needing to know how my mom felt about me now, I asked her if she still loved me.  She replied, “You are my son.  I’ll always love you.” and that was when I really bawled.  I hugged my mom tightly and cried on her, still not believing that she would really accept me for who I was because I knew she was the traditional Asian kind.