La Tiendita Mexicana (Gift Basket)

La Tiendita Mexicana (Gift Basket).

Cut the Fat – house scenes

the house

Originally uploaded by jinyookim2004

Last weekend, we shot the “reality” house scenes. I was going for a Korean drama look and I’m pretty sure I succeeded through my grandmother’s house. Her family room is literally the perfect manifestation.

I also wanted to tie in the sister’s looks with strong dark eyebrows. Their wardrobe was to make them look pedigree. That is, all the sisters except Mina, the blacksheep of the family. The dad wears a bahama mama shirt to reflect that he is “celebrating” his birthday and to visually signify irony against his moody disposition.

wordpress

hmmm wordpress will not let me upload videos on my blog without paying for it. this is making me a little angry and i’m contemplating switching over to blogspot.com, where i can embed things into my post without any problems.

i can’t believe i never noticed this before.

You can find all new updates here:

http://wherethelinesblur.blogspot.com/

and you can be sure to find video content on that blog.

A short video recap of our 507 semester

As a film student, what better way to recap a semester than through a short video? These don’t have any captions so you’ll just have to guess where we are and what we are doing. When I have more time, I *might* put captions into it but just take it as a visual story and we’re all good.

507 from jin yoo on Vimeo.

End of semester 1

As the semester winds down to a close, the weeks have been filled with screenings both on and off campus for me. The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival selected Go To Kenny as part of program 3 of “Love, Loss, Longing” and I’ve been hopping from one screening to the next, enjoying all the access I got as a badge holder. It was nice seeing some familiar faces again. Hopefully by this time next year, my FEATURE documentary will be selected at this festival (and at others, hopefully). I also realized that the closing night feature, Departures, the Academy Award winning film, was screened at USC a few weeks before with the director present. That completely made me realize how I shouldn’t miss these on-campus events. Some people would have paid a lot of money to be there.

As for on-campus screenings, our class set up a date last week to showcase the project we selected (between either project 1 or project 2). I chose to show my project 1, “Raider Nation” because my project 2 is still not ready for public scrutiny. My film was selected to go first out of thirty something films. I’m so glad I went first, even with the aspect ratio mayhem (there was nothing that important on the sides anyway, aside from my name in the credits) because by the time it was over, people were so emotionally drained. I mean come on, we were forced to feel something completely different every 5 minutes. It was like living an entire life time in 4 or so hours. I wonder if that’s what happens when you enter heaven and you see your life’s movie played in front of you. I’m sure it slows down in the parts where you’d rather have skipped through it though.

After the screening, we headed over to Joe’s house, where the afterparty and the awards ceremony took place. I was nominated for the most prepared to be sued for using copyrighted music and NFL product placement. Joe, who produced the Jurassic Park, The Musical, also got nominated, along with Josh’s movie. Of course, I won probably because every frame of my movie had either something NFL related or featured a song from the sports jam cd.

I’m so proud.

We also met with our next semester’s faculty and I’m pretty excited. I got to see two 508 sections’ screenings so far and I must say that the people who studied under my future faculty members had much tighter movies than the other section. There are still two sections that I haven’t seen but so far, I’m really excited about making three awesome films. My film is about my grandmother, and my two partners are making films on zombies and a homeless man.

I have to email a logline for my film to my faculty by next week. I’m still thinking about it but it will most likely  be something like “A girl comes to terms with her grandmother’s death through her dreams.”

So far I’ve seen the 547 documentary screenings, which were really well-made and inspirational, and two 508 screenings. Tomorrow, I plan on attending the next two 508 screenings as well as the 546 narrative screening at night. The following week I’ll watch the tv show screenings and the thesis films. What a great way to end the semester!

At the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, representing Go To Kenny. Michael Kuya, Me, David Ngo, Douglas McPherson.

At the Music Video program @ Downtown Independent

After the AWC Rewind program, enjoying the hot dog stand (filmmaker Mina Son in blue)

Me with Jay Esguerra, fellow filmmaker

The USC SCA 507 screening reception

With Ashley and Luke

Foodie Nation Rough Cut

Yesterday I had to show a rough cut of my film. Jin, why is the rough cut so extremely different from the dailies, and will it be extremely different from the final cut? To give you an idea of how many locations and subjects I filmed, here is my shooting schedule:

03/30/09: Nyala Ethiopian Cuisine. Food blogger = 1.
03/31/09: Serbian Tasting at Metro Diner. Foodies = 25 or so but interviewed about 10 (short questions).
04/5/09: LA Curry Festival. Foodie = 1.
04/06/09: La Casita Mexicana traditional menu tasting. Foodies = 20 something + chefs. (focused on the chefs).
04/08/09: Wonton Forest for lunch. Foodie = 1. Silverlake wine + Taco Run to Fletcher & Larga, and Rambos. Foodies = 2.
04/09/09: Dinner at Foodie home. Foodies = 2.
04/11/09: Nates BBQ for lunch. Foodies = 20 something. Dinner at Chicken Day, Soo Won BBQ, Hwa Sun Ji for dessert and tea. Foodies = 2.
04/13/09: Chicken Day pickup. Lady said I could film all the chicken fat they take out so I went to film it.
04/14/09: Dino’s Chicken and the Mich Paleteria in Duarte (Monrovia, Azusa), Filipino dinner @ Foodie’s home. Foodie = 1.
04/18/09: Special private Mexican dinner at the home of a self-taught chef. Foodie extravaganza. focused on two foodies, interviewed table of 12 short questions.
04/19/09: Tentative interview with a young food blogger at three different places. Two foodies later joined.

So how is it possible that I could condense all this to 5 minutes, right? I bought a 1 TB hard drive to store my media files. I also spoke to Brenda Goodman (producing professor) about the possibility of making it into a longer piece in the summer for which she will help me do the paperwork to get the rights of the project into my hands. My directing professor Albrezzi has encouraged me to explore it in a longer form so I’m definitely going to do this in the summer.

Speaking of summer, my summer plans are all over the place. I have a 5 year reunion at school for which I will have to fly over to Massachusetts for, and while I’m there I will definitely have to make my way over to NYC. Perhaps I can tour around the east coast for a while before coming back to start my internship and also take an improv acting class.  I really wish I can do something that brings in a bit more income, like being an SA or something but at the same time, I want to take it easy this summer and most importantly, just land one awesome summer internship and make side projects.

Career Day

So yesterday, a bunch of companies came on campus for career day. Some companies that I spoke to were ABC, CBS, Ascent Media, Fox, Lucasfilm, and Psychic Bunny. All of them have unpaid internships, which is down my alley since I can’t get paid for my services anyway. I’m going to find out how I can sign up for LACC internship courses so I don’t have to pay an arm and a leg to do this. Ideally, I will be working not so far from where I live because the commute is horrendous and I want to save myself some commuting time in the summer since I have to do it all over again in the fall. But, who am I to complain. If I get a good internship, I will drive two hours a day for it, no problem.