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Movie Making Muppet Madness
Shots from the indie movie I'm currently shooting, tentatively titled 'London Calling'. Will blog more about it at some point. Starring Justin Chan, Chermaine Poo, Melissa Maureen, Khairil M. Bahar and Johan John. Shot with my trusty Canon XM2 and the 'Kabij' lens adapter. Question: what gives away, almost instantly, the difference between film and video? It's not the colours or the clarity or what-have-you, all that can be tweaked in post to get it as close as you can to film, but one thing that you can hardly ever get on video that you get on film is the ability to do shallow depth-of-field. For those not in the know, shallow depth-of-field is when the object your filming is in focus but almost everything behind and in front of the object is an out of focus blur. A really out-of-focus blur. The main reason why film can do this but video can't is because of the size on which the image is projected on to as well as the lens. Ergo, if you attach a film camera lens onto a video camera, you can get the same effect. A lot of companies are now making these adapters for video cameras, with prices ranging between USD$500 and USD$2000. I've made my DIY one for about RM200. Below are the first test results of Version 1.2 of the 'Kabij', so called because there's a good adapter called the 'Letus' (geddit? 'Cabbage', 'Lettuce'? Hehe... I make joke). I've recently upgraded to Version 2.0, where I spent RM300 on a new lens and RM5 on super glue so that it's no longer connected with tape. Will post the pictures of the actual adapter soon, but for now, hope you like the footage. And yes, there's a huge chunk of dirt on the lens that, at time of test footage, I couldn't be bothered to clean. So what have I been up to these past few months? Well, one of the things I've been doing is acting (and no, it was not a reprisal of my bad Chinese accent as seen in 'Cellphone'). Acting in what, you may ask? Well, acting in this: Directed by Johan John, who I met through Tony Pietra via Niche films, 'Andai Kau Tahu' is a story of love, loss, regret and rebirth... and my scene involves two pre-op transvestites playing 'find the radio station' on my nipples. No, I don't know why either. But I don't mind suffering for my art. The movie's in post-production now, and will probably come out next year. But I'm back for a few short minutes (after months of not blogging) to say this:- 1. Working on a new project. 2. It does not have a title. 3. It's gonna be just as DIY as Ciplak. 4. And it may or may not have this shot in it: More on this as the project develops. The only slack thing about it is you have to be on-line to export your script to PDF, which is fine for you people who are constantly on-line but for us wi-fi guys it sucks a pair of balls. But only a small pair. Hmmm. Haven't posted in a while. Been a busy, busy beaver. As some of you may know from reading previous posts, I went to London recently and was planning to shoot some footage there and shoot the rest here for my next feature film. Some of you may think that that's what I've been up to. You'd be wrong. Truth is, I didn't get all the footage I was hoping to get (although it may be enough for a short film, we'll see). In a way, it almost feels like a curse. I always seem to start on one project that I'm really hyped up about and then stuff happens that makes me completely annoyed with the project and not want to do it anymore. The Curse Itself... My first feature was supposed to be a love story called 'Celup', but due to certain... circumstances, I ended up getting frickin' annoyed with the project and ended up resurrecting an older project which later became 'Ciplak'. Then I was supposed to do a short film for a multi-national company to help promote their product in the process, but that fell through at the eleventh hour as well (it's always at the eleventh hour) and fell into a funk, only to end up doing four episodes of 'Dark City'. Once again, I resurrected two old stories of mine which later became two of the four episodes - 'Eye See Eye Believe' and '4:20pm'. (Incidentally, the storyline structure of that short film was fleshed out into a made-for-TV film that'll be coming out soon about Sapok Biki, the Malaysian flyweight boxer who won the gold at the commonwealth games when it was held here). My second feature, the one I was going to shoot half of in England, was supposed to be a love story with the working title of 'Greener', inspired by movies such as 'Before Sunset' and '21 Grams' (a loose connection between the two, I know, but if you read the script you'd see what I mean). But the short time I had there (I didn't think a week would fly by so quickly) and the many things I wanted to do (buy a guitar, hang out with my old friends, go DVD shopping) meant I only got a handful of shots. Maybe 5%. But something else has formed in my head that I've been writing for the past week. In fact, within a few days I wrote about 50+ pages of the first draft, then decided it wasn't going anywhere, deleted it, thought about it, and spent the last three days re-writing it all tighter than a nun's crack. Writing's been going well, and I'm on the final act now. I won't say much now, so as not to jinx the curse, but I'll tell you some of the inspirations - Angel Heart, Robert Johnson and elements of Jangan Pandang Belakang. Oh, and it was a story I originally tried to sell as a possible fifth episode for me to direct for Dark City which wasn't accepted. Thank God. Harumph. I wrote a whole post yesterday on this subject, and what the fuck happened? Batteries died just before clicking 'send'. Godammit. The batteries dying right now, as we speak. Again. Bastard. But yes, it's official: I'm going to London this Thursday and won't be back till next Friday. And what will I be doing in London, pray-tell? Well, besides meeting up with my old buddies, checking out shit I can't afford, looking for a cheap guitar and trying to decide whether or not to watch the Rolling Stones (150 pounds a ticket! Madness!), I'll be shooting a movie. That's right. You heard it hear first. I'm gonna shoot a movie in London. Well, half a movie. The other half will be done here. And it's all up to whether or not I get my cast of old drama buddies in London. Since I'm still not at the stage where I can get investment for a mainstream movie over here and since I'm jonesin' to shoot something, I might as well do another 'Ciplak' style shoot, all low-budget and indie as fuckery. ('Fuckery - Crockery for nymphomaniacs) I can't say much at the moment, as I've only got half a script, but it'll be slightly depressing, this movie. A far cry from the fun and frolics of my last one. And, in keeping with the London mood, here's a free download of an old song during the first line-up of Triple 6 Poser, back when I was on vocals and we didn't rock as hard. 'London Town ' by Triple 6 Poser Mk. I (Right click and choose 'Save target as...') So yeah, another one of my episodes will be popping up next week (I think, still trying to get confirmation). After the mind-fuckery that was my last episode, this one's a bit more straight forward, although still not that linear. Interesting note: The other day the editor at Niche, James, commented on how every single one of my episodes starts at the end. I never realized this until he pointed it out, but it's true. And if I don't start at the end, I'll start at the beginning, then go to the end, then go to the middle, then the beginning, then the end again (blame Tarantino). I think the main reason I do this is because of the format and the knowledge of how fickle people watching TV can be. If I start with some kind of weird fucked up shit for five minutes, with no explanation, then go straight to what happened before in order to make the audience watch the whole show. I don't know if it works, but fingers crossed, eh? So yeah. 'Eye See Eye Believe' (or, as it's called in Malaysia, 'Mata Nampak Mata Percaya'). A straight up pontianak story (that's a Malaysian vampire for you Westerners), with a twist. The script was pretty tight and simple. A bit too simple, actually. For the first time I wrote too little, and had to shoot an extra scene after I edited it to fit the run-time (my original cut was 13 minutes long). This was also the first production where I got to use a bunch of really cool rigs for attaching cameras to cars... Unfortunately, the bad thing about the set up is that the cameras are rather obstructive. We had one camera at the front with a piece of card above it to stop any glare which already made it difficult for the actor to drive, then another on the left hand side which made it worse because if you drove too close to anything on the left you run the risk of destroying the camera. The ladder was actually used to do the spook floating scene. I needed a close up of the pontianak's feet rising and originally we thought we could just lift the actress up. No go. In the end, she sat down on the ladder and the two guys on either side lifted the ladder up and moved it forward, making it seem like she's floating. Nifty, eh? I could've sworn I'd win this bet, but I didn't. Blasted rain! So, yeah. Tune in next week on Astro Ria at 10.30pm Wednesday to check out this sordid little story. Please. |
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The cool thing about these rigs is that you can just keep driving and shooting and the shots you get look so much more high-budgeted than it actually is.
