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Surrey filmmakers in Storyhive contest hunt with futuristic dating-app tale

Pilot-making stage for ‘Lux-Me,’ billed as a sci-fi romantic comedy
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A scene from “Lux-Me,” a project created by Surrey-based filmmakers as part of Telus’ Storyhive contest.

SURREY — A team of Surrey-based filmmakers is behind a winning project in the latest round of the Telus-backed Storyhive contest.

Lux-Me, a sci-fi romantic comedy, earned project lead Bhaveek Makan and Rendering Glint Films a $10,000 grant to produce a web-series pilot, on the strength of a minute-long pitch video.

Of 215 entries in the contest, Lux-Me is among 30 project finalists from B.C. and Alberta.

Director/writer Makan, who recently moved here from Calgary, is joined on the six-person team by his brother Jashan Makan, Sumeet Kumar, Pooja Patel, Kajal Jindal and Bhavesh Chauhan.

“We’ve all been friends for six or seven years,” Bhaveek said.

“We found out about Storyhive and thought it was a good place to collaborate,” Kumar added.

As part of the contest, the team now competes for an additional $50,000 grant to bring their full web series to life. Voters will select one finalist from each province as the overall winners. Voting opens in February 2018, and the projects can later be viewed at storyhive.com.

Story continues below video

Now, the task is to make a pilot episode for Lux-Me, a story that takes place in the near future.

“It follows two South Asians, Aru and Noori, who both download the Lux-Me app, which pulls them into a world of augmented reality,” according to a post at storyhive.com. “In an identity-obsessed society, this app allows users to display their stats overhead (Gender Identity, Age, Relationship Status, Interests). As part of a new generation of South Asians living in Vancouver, our characters must try to balance their bi-cultural lives with the ‘modern’ times. The parents, Millennials, must teach their children of the Alpha Generation the culture from previous lifetimes. Everything slowly starts to fall apart as Aru begins to change his stats around different people, in order to feel accepted.”

Makan and his team have until January to finish the 10-minute pilot episode.

“We’ll be filming mostly in December and into early January,” Makan said. “It’s pretty CGI-heavy so a lot of the work is in post-production.”

Rendering Glint Films was founded in 2007 by the Makans. “From making short videos in their backyard, the Makan brothers decided to keep pursuing filmmaking whilst finishing off their university degrees,” according to a post at renderingglintfilms.com. “During the journey, they met up with other creative people who shared their passion for filmmaking.”

Since 2014, Storyhive has “proudly provided a safe space for content creators and screen based storytellers to hone their skills, take risks and bring the projects they care about to life.”



tom.zillich@surreynowleader.com

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Tom Zillich

About the Author: Tom Zillich

I cover entertainment, sports and news stories for the Surrey Now-Leader, where I've worked for more than half of my 30-plus years in the newspaper business.
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