Very smart little project. Not really a full movie with a long runtime or some deeper theme and plot. Rather it revolves around a 2 minute time machine video chat via a TV that they later expand to droste effect by placing the 2 TVs in front of each other so that they can see further into the future. A cafe owner in Japan discovers the video chat feature and it just works right away. He talks to himself in the future and then the future selves have to do exactly what happened on screen. So even if they lied or are in trouble they have to go in front of the camera and do what we saw them do. No one understands it clearly or knows why they are doing it. It's just something they feel must be done and it happens by itself.
Time Lapse (2014) has a similar story just with photos. It's based on a The Twilight Zone episode. Weirdly Time Lapse is one of the cheapest movies I have seen and this one makes it look like a blockbuster. This one legit cost nothing at all to make. With video time travel it's harder to make the time travel work. They tried to make everything one-shot. So that the acting is not great and the camera work is a bit primitive. But it has some calm and charming effect to it. The characters are smiling a lot and the story is not serious. So from the get go you get in a good mood here. Even when the bad guys arrive you are still in a good mood though a bit afraid for the characters. The movie is basically the movie makers presenting their cool idea of a time machine and then each scene expands on the idea. Much of it makes little sense. They just do what future selves tell them. And future selves do what they saw themselves tell themselves. Where is the info coming from? How do they know where to find money and how to win a fight? I'm not sure I fully get the logic of the movie. They use quite a few scenes explaining it. But the explanations are extremely basic. So clearly they themselves don't quite get it. It gets silly at times. But the weird comedic acting makes sure the silliness never feels irritating. You just go with the flow. The plot holes legit don't matter in a movie that feels like a light hearted romance/comedy, but is neither.
It's quite amazing how much movie you can make just using your smartphone camera and zero effects. They are also in just 1 single location. Using an apartment and a cafe and the camera follows the lead wherever he goes step by step. It legit is as cheap and easy to film as it can be. The time travel video chat looks like they recorded videos and then tried to fake video chat with themselves. Which is actually complicated acting. They likely talked to some other person on video chat and then edited it together in a cool way. But either way it's just not a video screen overlay, lazy cut editing, or some lazy zoom on a screen. We see them interact with each other on video. This stuff is not easy to write in a script and make work pre-preduction. The movie may have cost nothing, but it takes a year to write a script like this and know it will work.
I feel like this could have been a full movie with acting and plot. Not just a concept. You could have added on 20 minutes of just calm talk. Expanded on the romance. Maybe have them clean up the room together to create a connection. Just more human element to it. Instead it's super fast and someone is always saying something relevant to the plot and thinking about time travel. The first 10 minutes had that human element with the female worker in the cafe and the boss. She even got angry at him at one point and it felt like a proper movie. It made it feel real. But afterwards it became mostly about gags. And it's also not clear what happened to the video feed once 2 minute passed. They go to the place future selves are. But what then? They make sure to leave the camera after 2 minutes. I guess without that the script would be 10 times harder to write, but logically it's not explained. I guess that's why it became more and more silly as they knew there was not much logic left anywhere. But I feel like a few honest emotional scenes would have worked anyhow no matter the plot holes.
Very interesting movie for sure. Cool little project and Japan as a setting is quite pretty so it adds to the charm.
Time Lapse (2014) has a similar story just with photos. It's based on a The Twilight Zone episode. Weirdly Time Lapse is one of the cheapest movies I have seen and this one makes it look like a blockbuster. This one legit cost nothing at all to make. With video time travel it's harder to make the time travel work. They tried to make everything one-shot. So that the acting is not great and the camera work is a bit primitive. But it has some calm and charming effect to it. The characters are smiling a lot and the story is not serious. So from the get go you get in a good mood here. Even when the bad guys arrive you are still in a good mood though a bit afraid for the characters. The movie is basically the movie makers presenting their cool idea of a time machine and then each scene expands on the idea. Much of it makes little sense. They just do what future selves tell them. And future selves do what they saw themselves tell themselves. Where is the info coming from? How do they know where to find money and how to win a fight? I'm not sure I fully get the logic of the movie. They use quite a few scenes explaining it. But the explanations are extremely basic. So clearly they themselves don't quite get it. It gets silly at times. But the weird comedic acting makes sure the silliness never feels irritating. You just go with the flow. The plot holes legit don't matter in a movie that feels like a light hearted romance/comedy, but is neither.
It's quite amazing how much movie you can make just using your smartphone camera and zero effects. They are also in just 1 single location. Using an apartment and a cafe and the camera follows the lead wherever he goes step by step. It legit is as cheap and easy to film as it can be. The time travel video chat looks like they recorded videos and then tried to fake video chat with themselves. Which is actually complicated acting. They likely talked to some other person on video chat and then edited it together in a cool way. But either way it's just not a video screen overlay, lazy cut editing, or some lazy zoom on a screen. We see them interact with each other on video. This stuff is not easy to write in a script and make work pre-preduction. The movie may have cost nothing, but it takes a year to write a script like this and know it will work.
I feel like this could have been a full movie with acting and plot. Not just a concept. You could have added on 20 minutes of just calm talk. Expanded on the romance. Maybe have them clean up the room together to create a connection. Just more human element to it. Instead it's super fast and someone is always saying something relevant to the plot and thinking about time travel. The first 10 minutes had that human element with the female worker in the cafe and the boss. She even got angry at him at one point and it felt like a proper movie. It made it feel real. But afterwards it became mostly about gags. And it's also not clear what happened to the video feed once 2 minute passed. They go to the place future selves are. But what then? They make sure to leave the camera after 2 minutes. I guess without that the script would be 10 times harder to write, but logically it's not explained. I guess that's why it became more and more silly as they knew there was not much logic left anywhere. But I feel like a few honest emotional scenes would have worked anyhow no matter the plot holes.
Very interesting movie for sure. Cool little project and Japan as a setting is quite pretty so it adds to the charm.