Tuesday, 10 April 2007
12:04am
| S |
And that's all good because basically all those setups are going into the memory banks of my head so that when it comes to the times when I get to be the one calling the shots, I have all that previous experience to draw from. A couple of months ago I worked as a grip on one of the largest interior spaces I'd ever worked on, a large lobby. Let's just say that if I was the cinematographer on that project I would not have ordered nearly powerful enough lights or enough power for the situation. And I'm not talking about falling short by just a little... I probably only would have ordered about a TENTH of what was really needed. I would have been in huge, huge, huge trouble! So yeah, I've definitely been picking up some valuable experience in the last few months.... and good cinematography really is all about experience!
In January I shot a little pilot episode of a childrens show that was produced by members of my sister's church. It was all greenscreen... the background will be replaced with hand drawn backgrounds, somewhat akin to the "Elmo's World" segment on Sesame Street. That was a pretty fun little shoot. Just a couple of days later I jetted off to Hawaii with a group of folks from my own church. We were going to check out the DCAT conference at New Hope Christian Fellowship, a large church in Honolulu with a pretty innovative outlook on just how to run a church and get people involved and all that.
We were there with Pastor Ben Tabbal who grew up there and knew all the spots and showed us around, we definitely got to see a lot of stuff that few tourists ever see, and I suspect that few Hawaiians ever get to some of the spots we went to. For example, I went on a little hike with Tae along the Hawaii Loa Ridge trail -- about 2.5 miles each way through a lot of jungle and forest and there were also some extremely steep sections, especially at the end. It was quite gruelling and all in all i think it took us about 4 hours to complete the trip, but I gotta say, the view at the end of the trail was totally worth it! We basically made it to a spot where we could see the other side of the island, quite a sight to behold!
In February, "Shelter", one of the short films I shot while I was in film school was screened at L.A. Film School's "Exposure" screening which was basically for the best films to come out of LAFS in 2005. Supposedly there was gonna be a bunch of industry people there to watch. It was a real treat to get it seen projected in high definition on the big screen again, who knows if I'll ever get to see it projected with such quality ever again (the LAFS theater really is one of the best theaters in LA!!). As far as the networking opportunities that were supposed to come of it go... I'm not really sure anything really panned out from that, either for me or for Mike, the director, but hey, it was nice to get at least a little recognition!
Some more public recgontion did come not long after though, as "Shelter" ended up getting accepted into the Other Venice Film Festival, in Venice Beach, CA. Our first film festival! It screened in a program along with 9 other short films, and though we did not win any awards, ours was definitely one of the better shorts that screened, if I do say so myself. Despite the fact that the quality of the projection wasn't the greatest, It was actually really cool coming out of the screening while everyone was filling out their voting ballots and hearing people discuss which ones they liked -- and overhearing complete strangers saying stuff like "Oh yeah, 'Shelter' was pretty good too," and the like. And just the idea that something I shot had screened in front of a paying audience (even if we didn't get any of the money) of complete strangers gave me quite a feeling of accompishment, haha.
It was kind of funny though because I don't think my mom was really that excited when I told her that we made it into the festival... until like a week later when the Korean newspaper ran a multi-page aritcle on the Other Venice Film Festival, then she was like "woah, this is a big deal!", haha. Actually I was quite surprised at the thoroughness of the article -- you definitely don't see many real korean koreans showing up at stuff like this (and we still didn't, except for my mom and my sister who came with me to show her support). Actually, it seemed like a bigger deal to me as well, I mean if the Korean newspaper is noticing it, it must be getting pretty big, and this festival is definitely growing. And the bigger and more prestigious it gets, the better it makes our film look, haha. Maybe 5 years from now this festival will be so big that there's no way we would have made it in with the same film, but we'll still get to say that it was part of the official selection at the Other Venice Film Festival :)
At the end of February I went on a little impromptu camping trip to the desert east of San Diego with my friend Andy who lives near San Diego. Just thew some stuff in the back of his old Toyota 4x4 and headed out there. It was a pretty awesome trip actually because it was in the off season, so there was hardly anyone around at all. It was pretty awesome just driving out into the middle of nowhere until you got to a spot where there was just no sign of civilization anywhere around. No people, no structures, no power lines, no cars, no airplanes flying overhead, no sound of distant planes or freeways (something that you can never escape from in L.A.!!)... just complete silence and desolation. It was pretty dang neat, and kind of a different thing for me since I don't usually get into the camping thing very much. And since they didn't have any images, I added a couple of my pictures from the trip on to the Ocotillo Wells article on Wikipedia.
I guess that brings us to March. Actually I didn't do very much in March. I took things pretty easy, didn't really go anywhere, and did some prep work on a shoot that I did earlier this month, so maybe I'll talk about that instead. Oh wait, there is something -- I started taking Russian language classes in March. Why Russian? Well, to be quite honest, I fully intend to return to Tajikistan many more times in the future, and well, it would really help to be able to speak at least one of the same langauges as the people who live there, haha! So far I am having a pretty good time with it, although it is a bit frustrating as right now I have memorized a whole bunch of nouns but I hardly know any verbs or adjectives so I can't really form any real sentences yet, other than a few phrases which we learned as phrases as opposed to sentences I can construct out of individual words on the fly as the situation requires.
Once you learn the alphabet, the written side of the Russian language is pretty easy to master -- once you learn the sounds of the letters (and it can be confusing as there are some letters that look like English letters but have completely different sounds!) it's actually pretty easy to sound out words because with Russian, for the most part, you sound out every letter that you see. You don't have all these rules and exceptions to rules like in English where the same letter can make a bunch of different sounds depending on the context... or even a series of letters can make different sounds. "-ough" anyone? Cough? Through? Bough? This sort of thing doens't happen much in Russian.
But as simple as it may be to sound out the words... the grammar is quite complex. Like Spanish and many other langauges, Russian nouns have gender... but they have three genders! Male, female and neuter! All the adjectives and whatnot that go with those nouns have to be declined to match! It's a damned headache is what it is, haha.
And that pretty much catches us up to April. But I think I'll end this update here as it's taken me a lot longer to write this than I really expected to spend. Maybe I'll continue tomorrow... yeah right... well... we'll see :)
Friday, 13 April 2007
10:00pm
| A |
It was a pretty fun shoot, and it was nice being the guy calling the shots at least for a little while. Anyway, I'll be there at the booth at NAB so if you're gonna be out there, come check us out, South Hall, upper floor!