Actor Growth

If I am reading this correctly, apparently next month the short film that I acted and co-created for that Asian film marathon last year will be shown on TV. Basically, every entry from that year will be shown too.

For those that who are fairly newer to reading my blog and may have missed all of this, back in 2008 I entered this film festival competition for fun with a group of people. Essentially, the festival’s goal is to promote up and coming Asian talent. Basically, I was interested in doing the acting mainly and another person was inspiring to be a director. Long story short, it was such a chaos as the person didn’t follow through and was so disorganized. Did not want to create story boards, no rehearsal with the actors, etc.

Eventually, he dropped out and took his crew with him near the very last minute. Yet, in a struck of fate, and I mean in almost like a movie type of fashion, all these people started to come out of nowhere that were able to offer support which resulted in us being able to finish the film. If you are interested in reading it, I started blogging about it in about September 2008.

I still remember that time having to be the lead actor while being involved with the writing, directing, casting and editing all at the same time. Thinking back again, it was just amazing that we were able to even finish the whole thing with a one day shoot too. While the film wasn’t exactly like a triple A title due to all the setbacks, it was a really great experience and I met a lot of great people.

One interesting note, I actually had a hard decision to make creatively. Basically, one of the difficulties in editing the film was that the camera guy accidentally taped over footages as we shot the film. Basically, he re-winded the footage to preview it and as we taped the next scene he taped over the previous footage. Therefore, in the final cut there were some very messed up moments such as me running away except there was supposed to be two other people chasing me. Basically, the only footage that was left was a pre-test clip of me running through the area alone.

The thing is I could have decided to simply just cut the entire scene out of the movie. However, that meant cutting out the actors that volunteered their time to work on the film too. I know as an actor personally I wouldn’t have been too happy about that and so I opted to try and make it work. Of course, in a professional setting the decision to axe certain scenes to make sense of the movie as a whole probably would be the priority.

As for reactions for people that see it on TV the first time, I think it is going to be just like the theatre reactions. Basically, people that have no idea what we went through to make this film will probably be very critical of it. People that do know will tend to appreciate more.

Example, it’s like watching a film in one of those 24 hour competitions vs one’s that had like a whole month. I remember even one guy told me he was shocked to learn that we shot the whole thing in one day and that changed his whole perspective of the film. Kind of funny how that can factor in to people’s views about movies when you think about it huh?

I remembered that we did get the loudest roar in the theatre out of all the films for one particular scene. Let’s just say, my character had some colorful words to say about the antagonist. lol. Interesting experience overall. You know, when I think about it I think this film will give me a first of many things in my acting career funny enough. Basically, it was the first time I saw myself in a movie theatre screen for a film. With this, it’s the first time I will have appeared on TV as a lead role.

Holy moly. Well, this is it as today we officially submitted our entry. The film turned out fairly decent I thought considering all of the challenges that we went through. For the editing I actually stayed up well over 30 hours straight trying to do the best I could as the rest of my teammates were in school.

I think the music was really nice though. Time for me to get some nice deserved rest.

Okay, this editing is like non stop so far. It seems at this point it is mostly a sound issue as we are trying to fix up audio problems and using the appropriate music and sound effects. Back to work as this is due tomorrow.

Wow, this editing is going to be more challenging than I thought. I guess this is an example on how it is hard to be the actor and director in a film, especially with a time crunch. A lot of the footage had some framing that was definitely not what I envisioned or hoped it would be.

Therefore, we are actually spending a lot of time just piecing together footage that we have and trying are best to make sense of them.

So now that we have the entire film recorded it’s time to piece it all together. There are some interesting obstacles already though. Now since we had an extreme time crunch and I had to act as the director too in many ways, I couldn’t exactly see all the footage since I was in most of the scenes during taping.

Apparently there are some parts for an action scene that wasn’t even recorded. Yup, I guess the person accidentally forgot to hit the record button or something. But it looks like we had enough footage to still make sense of the whole scene. Tomorrow, we are going to spend even more time editing everything.

Not much to say, except I will be busy filming all day. Let’s see how this goes.