I decided it’s too hard to try to count every day because I think I’ve been inconsistent with weekends, and some weekends should definitely count as days because I’m working sets.
Today I PA’d on a set that a USC graduate was DPing on. It was pretty cool that they were using the Red One but on the flip side, the director (not a USC grad…not sure where he’s from) barely talked to the actors. In fact, it was the producer yelling “action” or “cut.” I found that very very weird.
So I had the aviator all ready to go but for some reason my file would not play. I think it’s because it was either too large of a file, or because I filmed it in 60i and outputted the file wrong, or something like that.
This is the last time I film anything without checking the format first.
I’m going to resize the file so it plays next week. All my classmates’ directing scenes were really great.
I spent the day posting a casting call for my project 1 tentatively entitled “Raider Nation.” I obviously will change the title afterwards. I decided to audition the guy and the girl roles together, without sides or the script because I want to see the humor that the actor brings into the scene.
I’m open to all ethnicities, and am looking for chemistry between actors, natural humor, and the versatile ability to go from being a workaholic to being a Raider fan for Tony, and for Lisa, the ability to be a chameleon, a strong likability and a high cuteness factor.
The hardest thing I see as of now, is to find the right makeup artist that is good with face paint.
This is how I want Tony to look when he put on face paint. It should look like the picture below but with the look above.
And this is how I want Lisa to look, after she’s done with her face paint:
The reasoning for this is that I want to show that Lisa is willing to be a Raider fan, but the end result is that she falls a little short. Hopefully this will translate to something that will be seen as cute.
I spent the entire day and night editing the same piece of footage (my directing scene) because I deleted all the audio tracks by mistake.
Note to self: never delete tracks on AVID, unless I have 4 plus hours to spare to make my life more stressful.
Today I came home to help my lil brother with his science project. He asked me to make him a short video of him dropping things from the roof, in order to test Aristotle and Galileo’s theory. I ended up filming, editing, and outputting this project in about 4 hours. Possibly the most efficient use of my time ever.
My call time was at 8:15am for a classmate’s project 1. I wanted to help him out since I had some time to spare this weekend before things start going crazy for me as I prepare for my project 1 in the coming weeks. His project had a lot of locations but since they were all located inside the campus, it was manageable and interesting to see what kinds of shots were possible to create a look that was very different from what I know of the campus. There was a commercial project that was shooting at the VKC and we were shooting around the periphery, because in the scene, the protagonist is a director, walking to her set. I think my classmate is really resourceful in finding out that there was a real commercial production going on that weekend and getting permits to shoot near it in order to add more depth to his mise en scene. In another scene, we had to lure some birds to come near us so we could shoot their beauty (the protagonist’s take on their beauty). These were the times we acknowledged the importance of animal wranglers. I felt good about offering good artistic suggestions and I learned a lot about what you can get away with in terms of introducing shots, playing with the focus, and capturing only the necessary elements to tell a story. I am sure these things will help me in shooting my project.
On Saturday night, I went to Kollaboration, an Asian American talent show. This year, it was at the Shrine, so it was just a block over for me, since I was already at school. I noticed there were a lot more sponsors this year, namely Hyundai. Although the show itself is steps up from years past, I think I prefer the smaller and more intimate feel of the shows prior to this year. The audio was horrendous for the first half of the show and I wasn’t able to decipher any of the sound, which is sad because a lot of the talent were singing in the first half. I felt like I didn’t get the full experience of their talents. After intermission, the sound was fixed and I had a more enjoyable experience. The best part of this night was Jane Lui, a piano-playing singer, whose voice is reminiscent of Evanescence and Alicia Keys. I absolutely loved her passion and her truth. I also enjoyed the dancing of Kenichi Ebina, who shocked me when he dropped his head to his stomach and held it there. It’s empowering to see all these talented Asian Americans up on stage, displaying talents from magic, to dancing, to singing, to stand up comedy.
The Oscars were better this year. I made a list of observations about this year’s Oscars ceremony:
1. The show had a lot of cool theatrical lighting, but only on stage.
2. Hugh Jackman practiced a lot for his song and dance. He also had no facial hair!
3. There was less lag time because as someone else pointed out, they put all the nominees in the front, two steps away from the stage.
4. I wonder if Natalie Portman and Alicia Keys were annoyed that they wore the same colored dress. Actually, there were way too many purple dresses this year.
5. Queen Latifah looked like a blue present.
6. Going to watch the Oscar nominated shorts helped me pick the winners for best live action short and best animated short. However, film school did not help me win the Oscar pool (I only got 16 out of 20 correct).
7. I think the two asian films that were nominated won, so I’m happy about that, even if it wasn’t Korea.
8. I liked that Penelope Cruz and Kunio Kato both said thank you’s in their language. Yay for diversity.
9. Jessica Biel’s dress completely masked her figure.
10. There is something very different about Halle Berry. Is it because she has longer hair? Did she take the same potion that Benjamin Button did?
11. Marion Cotillard’s dress made her look like she had a 10 inch waist.
12.The best dressed was Penelope Cruz, in a 60 something yr old vintage dress. CLASSIC!
13. Sarah Jessica Parker and her boobs.
14. Alicia Keys blew out her hair but she still had the white eyeshadow in the inner corner of her eyes, as always.
15. I liked Hugh and Beyonce’s musical act but thought it would have been better if Beyonce didn’t always sing like Beyonce in some of the numbers (it was stylistically wrong).
16. The lighting for the people in the audience was horrendous. For Ex, Kate Winslet was half in a weird shadow before they announced her as the winner.
17. I’m glad the kids from Slumdog were there and looked like they were enjoying themselves, even though they probably would have been better off just taking the cash equivalent of coming out here…but hopefully they will get enough exposure to jump start their careers.
18. My favorite part of the night was when the song Jai Ho came on. It was A.R. Rahman’s night!
19. Mickey Rourke and his sunglasses.
20. I am happy that predictions that people do not win posthumously were wrong because Heath Ledger totally deserved his win.
21. The guy from Man on Wire made the best acceptance speech in the history of the Oscars.
22. Sophia Loren didn’t move her head when she spoke, but neither did Nicole Kidman.
23. Goldie Hawn had two-toned boobs.
24. Kate Winslet was starting to stroke her Oscar but I’m glad she stopped before things got awkward.
25. A bit of an obvious attempt at trying to up their ratings but all in all, a very good improvement from last year with more stars on stage and montages galore.
In all seriousness, I’m glad Slumdog won best picture because I thought that was the best movie I’ve seen in a few years, despite all the controversies it’s dealing with.
Today was one of the most awkward days. I get up and wear my gym clothes to go to pilates class with my mom, where the teacher decides to grab on to my back fat for a good minute, screaming at me to lose it. Lady, if you have the secret formula to getting rid of that back fat that doesn’t involve a knife, let me know because I’ve been wondering how to get rid of that fat for a while. Gr.
Now I’m hunched over in front of my computer, sitting on my bed, with this bruised back, wondering what I did to make someone feel like it was okay for him to tell me that he has feelings for me (not my bf). I wonder if it’s the way I carry myself. I wonder if I project some kind of attitude or aura that gives people the impression that I’m available or that it’s okay to come on to me. I should probably toughen up and give out more aggressive and unlikeable vibes. I don’t like the idea of changing who I am but I also do not want to be sending unintended signals.
I have to get up at 7am tomorrow to help out a friend with his project #1 shoot and all I can think about is how annoyed I am that I had to deal with this today.
I pitched my project #1 idea today and I got some really good constructive criticism back. So basically, I’m going to stick with the female character and make it her story. This will be easy since the female character is based on myself. I was also encouraged to explore cartoonish cinematography. I talked a little to my cinematography professor about this but she told me to email her my idea so she knows exactly who to direct me to. SO, I will be working on finalizing my script this weekend. I’m pretty happy. I am now researching on how to be a rabid raiders fan. This culture is fascinating. Why is this team so much more crazy with their get up than other teams? It’s pretty interesting. I knew I should have taken sports psychology in college. darn. Maybe I can email my psyc professor and see what her take on it is.
Today we shared our adaptation and roommates assignment in ideation class. The basic point of these assignments was for us to start thinking cinematically. We had to read a bunch of short stories and were allowed to pick one of those or other works of art to translate to film. It’s not really about being faithful to the original work but to get at the thing that evoked a feeling in me that I want to talk about.
A friend from Bolivia emailed me a goodbye love letter that she wrote to a man who she had hoped to start a relationship with but the feelings were not reciprocated. There was something about the letter that made me want to read it over and over again. There was a sense of longing and desperation in the letter. It was a final attempt at trying to appeal to the man’s heart. She was trying to get at his humanity – at the very essence of what made this man so attractive – his spirit. In reading this letter, I couldn’t help but wonder how it would be to receive a letter so passionately written by someone. Maybe it would matter who it was coming from. How would I react if it was anonymous? What if it was from someone I had always wished it was from? What if it was from someone I am sick of? All these questions started racing through my head. I wanted to use it to fuel my inspiration so that I could write a story.
I ended up writing some backstory and ended it with the love letter. I wasn’t too happy about it because I don’t think it was too necessary to even include the letter into the story. The letter was inspiration but it doesn’t have to be a part of it. I also see this story going in a completely different direction. It can work as a voice over as the female protagonist waves farewell to her home country and we can follow her as she embarks on a new chapter in her life. I have to look deeper into this because there is so much depth here that I can explore. It could even be a funny story between way too many people who get involved in reading this love letter.
People are starting to freak out about their project #1. It’s a little strange because I have two weeks before I start filming my project so I feel a bit lazy in comparison to my classmates. I also finished my directing scene last weekend and I’m done editing it as well and I purposefully did this so I could have a less stressful time working on my project #1. So I almost feel like I’m living my life in slow motion while everyone else is going in real time.
Today in cinematography, we were separated into two big groups rather than three as we usually do it. I was DP this time and I’m not sure how good of a DP I am. Lighting is pretty intimidating because it’s one of those things where I can’t see the mistakes immediately. For example, our professor would remark that our lighting is either flat or high contrast, etc and I would not have seen it had she not pointed it out. After realizing the mistake, I have to correct it but that’s where I falter. How do you correct something that you don’t completely understand? I’m still trying to wrap my head around “having the dark side of the face point towards the camera” because people move! Also, lighting gets complicated again when there are two or more people in the scene, many depths and active motions. The other thing is that if I realize my lighting is flat, for example, I might not notice the triple shadows behind the person because I’m focused on unflattening my lighting. That’s kind of what happened from last week, even though I wasn’t the DP for that. We thought we lit the scene well but when we saw the dailies from last week, we could clearly see where all the mistakes were, from the horrible shadows to the overlit foreground.
The other group seemed more cohesive and energetic. Our group was lagging a little and less motivated. I think we were all a bit tired and just wanted to get through the exercise. I think in the end we managed to pull off some dramatic lighting and I photographed some behind the scenes. I’m not too fond of how the groups were sectioned off. I almost prefer the three groups instead. When we had three groups, each person had an individual and specific function. In our large groups, we had way too many grips and even when we had the smaller groups, the grips had the smallest roles in our exercise so I don’t see the point in having so many grips. Maybe the role should be called grip/actor since that was the reason we had to make bigger groups anyway – so we had better use of people in terms of acting.
Anyway, I felt a bit flustered today. Definitely not at my peak. I think up until now I felt like I had to continuously prove to myself, my teachers, and my classmates that I’m not bad to work with, that I’m likeable, and that I am dependable. Now I realize that even though some people in the beginning of the program didn’t make the best impressions, we are all working hard to learn and make an active effort to better ourselves.We can acknowledge our mistakes and move forward.
For example, I noticed some overtaking of sets by non-directors and thought to myself how that is not polite. Then, when I was shooting for my partner, a passerby totally walked through our set and I yelled, “cut!” in aggravation. Although I did say it mostly so the passerby could hear it because she was being rude, I immediately felt like a doofus because that’s exactly the impolite thing I had witnessed before and thought I’d never do that. Now I can only make sure that I don’t do that to anyone else on their set in the future. These kinds of things happen to remind me that I’m not free from these pitfalls and the only thing I can really do is ask for forgiveness and move on.
Later, I met up with some classmates and we went to go watch the Oscar nominated short films at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, where they even confiscate chewing gum! Well, if I owned a theater that nice, I’d probably make people come in wearing scrubs. My favorite live action short…this is so difficult, but I really liked “On the Line” because of the longing, the guilt, the conflict and suspense. However, I have a feeling that “Toyland” will win the Oscar because it is about the holocaust but with a different angle and has more of an “important” feel. The other films were also really good. I loved “New Boy” because it talked about different cultures (Ireland and Africa) and “Manon on Asphalt” had this Amelie quality to it plus time just seemed to stretch out in this incredibly artistic way. “Pig” was a crowd pleaser and my friends liked it a lot but I don’t think it has much of a chance to win an Oscar. The incredible thing, however, was that it was the director’s first film and SHE is a woman. As for animation, I really liked “La Maison en Petits Cubes” because it was the only non-comedic one, I loved the watercolor look of it (the filmmaker admitted that he’s not really an animator but a painter and he wanted to see his work the way he created it), and the one with the story that tugged at your heart. The other animations were fun and funny. This one is definitely going to win. FOR SURE.
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