9 posts tagged “film”
First weekend of shooting Dream Cradle. Unfortunately I haven't any of the actual stills just yet. These are all photos from continuity.
I think I did well, considering it's my biggest production yet. I still have a way to go but oh my god, we got some beautiful shots thanks to Rich Wang, our brilliant DOP. Sascha was a superb First AD and of course I wouldn't be anywhere without Pasquale as producer nor our lovely actors. Damien was right when he said I must have something to have a crew of such caliber. I'm not sure what it is, luck probably, but working by their side was humbling and it made my job so much easier. Everyone was slick efficient. I'm quickly developing some techniques to directing and it's been a really great learning experience so far. It's pretty amazing how the script is so shootable because being broken into three different narratives, we can afford to shoot in throughout two weekends, which is invaluable to an independent production.
It's knowing exactly what you want before everyone else that's a challenge, but that's something that comes with practise and experience. I still think that for the lack thereof, I did really well. The rushes look beautiful so far. I hope post comes along smoothly. The Red is a beautiful camera to shoot on, it's not funny, but post is going to be a bit of a bitch. Addamski's going to be doing special effects and with him on the team too, I can't imagine how we could go wrong.
"I think it's an exciting time for Asians. They're getting more recognition. I believe you'll take every opportunity to excel in your work. I'm optimistic in imagining watching you on TV getting recognition. I'm watching the Oscars of course and believe my daughter is good enough for the world."
I sent my parents an email yesterday saying that I was planning on staying on a little longer in Brisbane to shoot my short film. Truth be told I've put it off and dicked around with how to do it for the longest time because I've been scared. I'm scared and I over think things. This project has been my baby for more than a year now and people have been so supportive of it that I got worked up about living up to my own expectations. It's so silly that I get terrified of looking at my own stuff in post, even with photography hahah but it's something I'm willing to get over. Silly girl. The more I learned about film, the more I felt like I didn't know anything. It's such an encompassing subject but it's not anything to do with the 'magic of cinema' that makes it daunting. Film is not a glorious occupation more than any other. Anyone could be afraid of taking the next step in life, of trying new things. The difference between the people that make it in life and those who don't is they don't let it get to them. I'm determined to not fuck my life up but I've taken enough time off asking myself "how?".
I thought I was going to get into trouble with my parents. I've got a lot of questions I can't answer like when I'm going back or what my budget is and my mom texted me this afternoon. I really don't know but I have friends who will help me. People have been surprised by my vulnerability because I can act so tough but it's something that I learned from Duygu that it's what makes a real woman. A man's strength requires you to put on a brave face all the time and wrestle your fears in front of an audience whereas a woman's strength blossoms when she can cry. Because she's clever and realistically she has laid out all her challenges before her, including her personal weaknesses. The amazingness of it is when she sees all these things and overcomes them with everything inside of her.
"You're so beautiful. I love you so much. It's ironic that whenever I think I'm going to get into trouble you guys give me more. I'm too lucky to have you both as parents."
Which is true because I fought with a teacher when I was 14 and was terrified when my parents got called into office in the middle of the afternoon. They spoke to the principal but came out laughing and took me out for lunch. I even got to leave school early. My parents are amazing because they have a threshold with which they love me even more when I'm bad. I'm SO spoilt, you cannot even imagine!
"We're applying reverse psychology. I hope it works! Hahahah."
What beautiful beautiful people. With regards to the Oscars, I'm ECSTATIC that this year's lineup has been so wonderful. THANK YOU for awarding 'Jai Ho' of Slumdog Millionaire as best song for a feature after last year's was 'It's Hard Out There For A Pimp'. Seriously. And how funny was it that Alicia Keys did her own drum roll before announcing the best score for a film. I mean, you have one of the world's best orchestras with you on stage, what what.
If Hollywood's bad run is up, it really is going to be a good year for America. It does give me hope again that the world has come back to terms with acknowledging quality and using their intelligence in performing their tasks bravely. As for me? I've never put myself side by side with the Oscars. It's a fun awards ceremony but I can think of other film festivals I'd love to be a part of too. Film and everything else I do is purely for other people's enjoyment and inspiration. I don't have an inkling on how far I'll ever get but the way my family and friends have showed they love me, I don't need a stage to be this thankful. ]=)
"Sex Space Intimacy
It's Melody's Show at the Judy :) ...A plethora of good shit.Event InfoHost:The Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary ArtsType:Music/Arts - ExhibitNetwork:GlobalTime and PlaceStart Time:Tuesday, October 7, 2008 at 5:00pmEnd Time:Saturday, October 18, 2008 at 8:30pmLocation:Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary ArtsStreet:420 Brunswick St (Cnr Berwick St), Fortitude ValleyCity/Town:Brisbane, Australia
http://web.me.com/vote.bohemia/Site/Home.htm
OCTOBER
Tues 7th until Sat 18
Opening night Thurs 9th Oct
more details: http://www.judithwrightcentre.com/02_cal/details.asp?ID=620
Sex Space Intimacy is an unabashed look at the feminine identity and its relationship to sexual culture, the physical/historical space we occupy and our intimate relationships.
Emerging artist, Melody Woodnutt fuses sound, light, construction and artwork in this interactive installation to challenge our position and relationship with art, inviting us to question our perspective and heed our compliance with popular thought. Participate in the interplay between abstraction and experience, literally stepping into, on and around the fabricated construct of societal views.
Film by Nadira Ilana.
OPENING NIGHT DRINKS Oct 9th Rock up to take a peek and have some drinks!
Pop an arty cherry.
Hell pop an arty cherry every night of the show!"
I'm pretty excited about this post. Throughout high school, most of what I watched was American musicals from the 1940s. It was mostly that I was quite musical back then and enjoyed performance and performing, that I came to appreciate multi-talented performers. I know a lot of people who say they don't like musicals, which I think is a shame and probably due to the fact that they haven't seen many amazing ones.
I love the colours, the exaggerated acting, plot twists, cinematography and choreography. I love how I light up as soon as soon as a character in a musical's eyes start to gleam like the lights just went on in a room. Film musicals today hardly live up to what they were back then. You know that's true when you've got the likes of Renee Zellweger, Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman trying to belt a tune on screen. That's right. Eww. Here are a few wonderful scenes from my favourite musicals:
'Sweet Charity' starring the adorable, Shirley McClaine.
Surprisingly when this film came out, it was badly received by critics. I think it's because it was ahead of its time. That cigarette trick he does? Holishitt. It's a wonderful movie for when you want to escape from the real world.
And that concludes the lesson for today. Musicals are awesome and should not be belittled. These were people who could act, sing, dance, play instruments and look good all at the same time. That definitely calls for respect.
Four years of living abroad and soon I graduate. Soon I graduate and moving back to KK (even if temporarily) is all I can think about because I'm tired of not having a home. I love to travel but travelers have their homes and I'm borderline nomadic which is so not what I want to pursue. Of course, I'm grateful. A lot of people I know are griping about having not left their own countries, wanting to pursue something better and I keep telling people - the rest of the world isn't better. It's just the rest of the world. I've accumulated a lot of wisdom but never enough. The test of me surviving on home ground seems far more difficult. We're talking Kota Kinabalu here and I'm plagued by the fact that so many young people have to be torn between staying and pursuing better careers and lives elsewhere... like one day we grew up and realised Sabah wasn't good enough. Trust me to have a Peter Pan complex.
Maybe it's that we don't want it to ever turn into a metropolis so we don't stay to fix things. Even if we were the ones to build it to that we'd feel guilty but it's us or the politicians who do. People are so weak and silly sometimes. They don't realise that when there's nothing but raw, fertile soil, they can be the pioneers. As in, don't search for an industry, start one and you'll be legendary. Roger Wang's made a good start already. I just want to film us before we all lose our culture to the west, West Malaysia, Koreans, pilaks and Christians. Damn those missionaries are sprouting churches like mushrooms and I kid you not. I still attest to the emphasis of religion before education because how else are you going to comprehend religion? Tangent.
Okay, plans. Again with my big plans. Little girl, big plans. People say that they look at me and they see spark, talent, success. Nice to know but I get paranoid thinking that they're picturing me - red carpet, lots of moolah and doing a Michelle Yeoh. Hell no I'm selling my soul to fucking Spielberg. My definition of success is to capture our culture and people on film in order to remind us who we are. Culture is what counts, it is what makes us unique. It's what makes friends stronger, beer taste better, the days shine brighter and the coldest nights, warmer. Without it, we have no umbilical cord. And take it from someone who has somehow developed an American accent and can hardly speak Malay for shit. Adapting is surviving but preservation is fighting. It's paying your respects to what you love. And then people gripe about censorship... of course Malaysians are conservative when it comes to how we define ourselves, it's because they don't see enough variety, they don't see enough of what they do. We're living in the age of youtube and pirated editing software. We really don't have much excuse to fail. It's not a financially secure career but it's a worthy pursuit.
I watched Shawshank Redemption the other day. I could relate to Andy Dufresne, making do with unfortunate circumstances. My circumstances aren't terrible but I am at a disadvantage with what I want to do but I know I'll have the support of friends, family and people who love Sabah as much as I do. I'm trying to figure something out and last as long as I can and I'll tell you to mind tuttering at me. Pfft. I'm young. I might as well do something before my youthful optimism runs out. So long as some good comes out of my naivety, "youth is for revolution." Mine will not be wasted. What the hell do I know about what I'm up against but I'll find out and that's more than what most people have done so far.
Even better, I got treated to it because I was modeling for a friend's Turkish t-shirt line. I want to do more modeling. I've some experience and I'd say I understand the camera's mise-en-scene quite well by now so if I'm ever in your vicinity or vice versa, look me up.
Now onto something less savoury. The Oscars was a travesty. Double standard bullshit. Foreign film as a category when Atonement and La Vie en Rose are not American films. It's not a foreign film nomination unless it's depressing and has to do with a war of some sort especially the holocaust? Miley Cyrus and Jessica Alba presenting awards? And I knew they'd have one animated character hocking up puns - Jerry Seinfeld from Bee Movie which I will never touch in a million years. It looks like cliche tripe. The Oscars have been put on a pedestal long after they lost their integrity. I refused to watch last year's because Ellen Degenres was hosting and true enough, Scorsese won an Oscar for The Departed which was an adaptation of a "Japanese film". Quote wrong quote. If I was Andy Lau I'd be angry too. The Departed was a horrible movie the only reason why Scorsese got the Oscar was because they felt indebted to him. Well if you gave him best film instead of Rocky that year he wouldn't have won for The Departed. What about films like 'A Scanner Darkly'? And why did CLINT EASTWOOD win best foreign film for Letters to Iwo Jima when he's America's most famous cowboy? Doink. I'm surprise Chuck Norris hasn't gotten an Oscar yet.
I am especially concerned about Hollywood's new wave in distribution. To cut down on costs for distribution, Hollywood is now putting a lot of big budget productions straight to dvd. That means less premiers, less movie shows, more money for them and production. Hollywood already produces so many films they're going to flood us all. Imagine Bollywood amounts of production but with a Hollywood budget. 20 million films were made in 2007, this includes independent films. And don't forget, there's also Nollywood. The only people who are going to be making money is Hollywood because they still have the big names attached.
Film making is capitalist ground. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. With the rich gaining more access to the public through television, dvds and the internet, the rest of us can't compete. Watching a film will be equivalent to looking at a still photograph. This mass production is not only going to affect people's salaries but it will also further devalue art. As if Hollywood hasn't done that already. Out of all the films in the world, the ones nominated for Oscars were only notable ones attached to production houses who have solid alliances with the Oscar committee. And it's not only that, the cinema is communal ground. If things go straight to dvd, that means we don't get to choose what we want to see on the large screen. Going to the movies is traditional, it's a treat, a culture. We're going to be desensitised further, how evil. And I've met a big time New York distributor before. He was a cocky asshole and it makes me sink inside, thinking that someone like him would be so comfortable upsetting this fragile balance as long as he still gets his money. The fool. I bet he's a huge Warhol fan. How is it that you can get PEOPLE whose designs are so unintentionally Dadaist it makes you want to puke?
Film making will reduce in its stature as a trade and more as a hobby for the masses. It already feels like that in South East Asia. Maybe I was right about it being safer there. But maybe that's a wave that's meant to be. Maybe this insane surplus will act as a sporing mushroom and the easiness of film making will birth little pieces of art across the globe all the more. Soon we will need visual libraries when films become as commonplace as books and the written word.
I guess I could live with that but oh damn. If I'm gonna be out of a job I better start looking for a sugar daddy quick.
Went on a shoot yesterday. My internship from last semester's over but my boss and I are very fond of each other so she let me come along. If I don't manage to find an internship with a narrative feature/short film maybe I'll just continue with her. It's my final year so I thought I'd try my hand at narrative but it's not easy, finding these things. Either way it's interesting stuff, what she does, freelancing for a science documentary for public TV. It's about 15 minutes long, standard stuff and my favourite thing to do is sit through interviews. Sometimes I get to call up professors from Ivy League universities and we interview them. So far I've been on a shoot at Columbia University and yesterday was at Cornell. Yeah, shoots in Manhattan. I'm a pretty lucky girl.
The subect of yesterday's documentary was one I helped research. It's on zebra finches and how scientists use them to research auditory learning in humans by using FMRIs. Fascinating stuff, really. So at the end of the interview I asked the professor if stimulating the birds using audio while they were unconscious would give them a more accurate reading than when the birds are conscious. He told me actually they get stronger readings on the MRI while the birds are unconscious and I went "oh! That's because birds sleep with half their brains, don't they?" then started dribbling out all this (what I once thought was) useless information which actually came in handy. My boss was pretty impressed and ask me how I knew all this and I said "TV documentaries."
All this while I never thought much about documentaries. I watch them sometimes but other times they don't hold my attention as well as narrative. The one that I'm working on only airs for 15 minutes but it gets around and affects people because even this old lady I was sitting on the bus with brought up something she saw on the show. I realised then the power of good documentaries. You get a lot of bad, boring ones out there or ridiculous hyped up ones like Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock beating off onto the camera lens. But documentaries can be so amazing in how they just are. I still don't quite understand the concept of 'audience ratings' because it feels so unrequited. Yet, it wasn't till last night that I realised how much they contribute to people's everyday conversations and not just any conversation, SUBSTANTIAL conversations which are rare. It's the rare occasion that people would actually think about something and that's just beautiful. I like what I'm doing. Between documentaries and narrative, I'd say I like them both.
Okay now I sound like a real fangirl. Royston Tan posted this on his blog and I've been listening to it over and over again. I found a copy of 15. Love, loved, loves it to death. I love movies where I just can't picture how they shot it. 15 must have been so hard to make. It would have taken a lot of courage and belief to go through with. It's hard to find people that are that headstrong who still know their shit after bargaining so hard with their can and can't dos. At this moment, Royston is my favourite director ever. Yes yes. I don't know why my mind compares him to Kubrick. Possibly because I heard he can be a meticulous pain to work with. I still would.
If anyone's wondering, yes, I will be coming back to Asia to work. No doubt about it. It's what I understand and what makes sense to me. I'm not limiting myself, I've done my traveling (although I'll never be done with traveling). It's just that I know where my heart lies and that is with Asian culture. I got into film because I love a good story and I learnt that film is about keeping a culture. After spending my life torturing myself about not being Malay, Chinese, Muslim or having a cultural identity in general, I'm intending on taking on the heavy responsibility of archiving and preserving culture using the second most accessible medium available. Eat that, Puan Marinah.
Once again, Royston Tan has pulled off another delightfully entertaining masterpiece. I know, that sounds so lame but the movie really is that good. I haven't seen 15 but I've seen 4:30 and a couple of his short films and he has to be one of the best directors I've seen in a long time. His style is always refreshing, always innovative and for a 32 year old, he seems to be a natural on set which is remarkable. How he does it? I don't know but I'm jealous.
I only discovered Asian films at the beginning of last year and I'm in love. It's love I tell you and here's a list of 11 contemporary Asian films that I highly recommend:
- Perhaps Love / Peter Chan (Taiwan/Hong Kong)
- Berbagi Suami / Nia Dinita (Indonesia)
- I'm a Cyborg but That's Okay / Park Chan-Wook (Korea)
- The Host / Bong Joon-Ho (Korea)
- 4:30 / Royston Tan (Singapore)
- Time / Kim Ki-Duk (Korea)
- 881 Papaya Sisters / Royston Tan (Singapore)
- In the Mood for Love / Wong Kar Wai (Hong Kong)
- Shutter / Parkpoom Wongpoom and Banjong Pisanthanakun (Thailand)
- Cinta / Kabir Bhatia (Malaysia)
- Mukhsin / Yasmin Ahmad (Malaysia)
Yes, Mukhsin. Because the woman finally got some sense and a damn editor. Rain Dogs, which is a Malaysia production, would have been good too if it didn't drag on for way too long. I like long movies. If it tests even my patience, I think it says something. At least now that I know I love Asian films I'm closer to finding my niche. Who knows if I stick strictly to film making. Even I don't see that future for myself, I think I'm much more versatile but we'll see. I graduate this year. There go the strings, there goes my leash. There I go, world, run for cover. You have been warned.
