How to Stop Shooting on a Toaster (CAir Jordan)

The Chicon Chapters (Chp 3)

CAir Jordan: A fun experiment that taught me the importance of cinematography and changed the look of of every film I made after!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3cw0ZBN_cE

I honestly can't really give you a reason for why I never posted CAir Jordan. Maybe I didn't feel it had legs? Maybe I was worried it wasn't funny enough or well shot enough to go up? Or maybe I though people just wouldn't get it? Well... f*** it, it's going up now.

CAir Jordan is what happens when a filmmaker considered the cinematography in his films pretty ugly. I think my films always succeeded at making people laugh but to be completely honest... They looked like they were shot on a toaster.

CAir Jordan wasn't some huge project. The crew consisted of me, my brother and Gustavo who held a single bounce board (thanks Gustavo). I woke up one day, borrowed a Canon C-100 from my fellowship and forced my little brother Diego to go to the park with me and shoot a basketball. For the first time in my life, I wanted to put an emphasis on the visuals of my film. I wanted to be able to say, "Wow, that's a great shot" but of course in true Danny fashion... I needed to throw a few jokes in there.

This was the shot I ever clicked record on where I could truly say "YO! That's cinematic AF!"

Now I've always had a fascination with sneakers. More specifically, how I and other people obsess over them. I always found it incredibly ironic that huge brands like Nike, Jordan and Adidas would sell overpriced pairs of sneakers and their main demographic were normally the underserved communities that, honestly, can't really afford them.

Then there's the commercials (especially pre- 2020 when I shot this), the ones that claim that these gigantic corporations actually care about the people they profit off of, so that's exactly what I thought to parody. The concept was easy, make something short, focus on what I called "beauty shots" that took a quick jab at what I had always found so funny my entire life. If I could take one of those commercials and rev it up to ten... Well, that's what CAir Jordan is.

Probably my favorite sequence, I love how dramatic this script could get. Because buying sneakers is obviously as high as the stakes get.

Luckily, I've got a basketball player in the family who pulled off the athlete look and can shoot 3,400 times better than I ever could. I'm happy to say this is one of the few projects in this series where it really did come together like I hoped and ever since, my projects have felt far more cinematic and I cab regularly say to myself, "Wow, that's a pretty great shot". You can watch it above!

Took Diego 7 tries to make this shot... THAT'S RIGHT LIL BRO YOU'VE BEEN EXPOSED!