HopkinsCinemAddicts

Production Diary #6 (Hee Won)

         I am writing this post on April 20th, two days after we finished shooting. From the 15th to 18th I experienced every spectrum emotion possible, ranging from exuberance to devastation. Although I cannot feel my shoulders from carrying so much equipment over the weekend, and I have 15 bruises across my four limbs from my carelessness in navigating the set, I still have not fully realized that I am done shooting the film. With no exaggeration, these three days were some of the most panic-inducing, stressful, hectic days of my Hopkins life. It was hard. There is no other way to put it, but I think I enjoyed it. I think.

         The chaos started on Friday, picking up equipment from three different locations: the DMC, Gilman 35, and the Film Center. Because not everything could fit in our small four seat car that we borrowed from a friend, we had to make multiple trips just to have everything in one location. After getting all the equipment sorted out, we rushed to Giant and bought all the food that we need for the three-day shoot. Then, I picked up the actors while Sue unloaded everything and delivered the car back to her friend. I ran around all of Charles Village collecting props that I reserved from various people. I walked a total of 13000 steps from 5pm to 11:59 pm. When we were done with everything, it was 12:30 am and we had to wake up at 5am to transport all the equipment to the location and start production design. 

        The first morning was the busiest time of the whole day. Sue had to  drive from Homewood to our location in Hamden many times to transport the crew and extras. I had to bring all the equipment to the set and start production design. In the midst of all that, actors started to arrive and and I had to greet them and give them instructions and answer their questions. We started shooting at 9:30am and ended at about 6pm which was 30 minutes over our planned schedule. I did not think that so many things could happen in the 9 hours of time that we had. There wasn’t anything that was extremely horrifying but there were some very stressful situations. The cat scene was almost impossible to shoot, because the cat got annoyed at everyone on set, lighting was tricky with very little daylight coming into the house, and we had some trouble with equipment and props. Because there was such low light, we ended up having to shoot some of our scenes in digital with the Canon C300. After the shoot, we sent everyone home and we stayed behind at the location until 9pm to return the house to its original state. When we prepared everything for our Sunday shoot, it was 11pm.

         Our Sunday shoot began in Penn Station at 10am. We were worried because we really hadn’t gotten the permission we needed to shoot inside the station. Because we did not want to be noticed by the Amtrak police, we went into the station with minimum crew, and acted as if we were just a student group. We managed to get the scene of our character getting in to the ticket line without being noticed but we definitely got attention from the Penn station employees when we were shooting a scene of her sitting on one of the benches inside: one of the guys at the front desk stood up with his arms crossed and gave us a stern look. We all left the station hurriedly before getting caught and finished our Penn station scene in exactly 20 minutes. After this scene, we relocated and shot multiple tracking shots of the grandmother. Because  it was almost impossible to load the dolly, we ended up using a wheel chair. It was scorching hot and the wheel chair was very jerky so it was difficult to get a good shot. We wrapped after shooting two more indoor scenes. We managed to finish around 5:30 pm and when we sent everyone home it was about 6pm. After transporting our actors, we returned the equipment and props that we didn’t need,  and planned our shoot for the final day.

         I woke up at 6am before my alarm went off because I was very nervous. We had to shoot inside Union Station and inside the MARC train which were both locations we did not get a full permission from. I was very worried also because we had to shoot all the train scenes in an hour without getting caught by the ticketing agent. I was also worried because our actor, the grandmother, told me that she was not able to get enough sleep last night. We were shooting in 4 locations from 9am to 4pm so it was going to be a tiring day for everyone but it was especially going to be tiring for her. It was indeed a very stressful day. As soon as we got off at Union Station, we started setting up the camera to film a scene of her exiting the station. 2 minutes into shooting, the security officers came to stop us. We thought that they are going to kick us out and makes us format our card, but Sue showed them an email that she exchanged with the Union Station authorities and they just told us to wait for a little. While they made us wait, I spoke to my actor in Korean and secretly kept rolling the camera. After couple of minutes, they came back to us and told us that we had to leave. Because we got what we wanted, we just packed up and left. They came back to us when we were shooting the exterior of the station but we begged them to give us 5 minutes and they did. Because everything was so rushed, I don’t know how everything looks but we did get all the shots that we planned on getting.

         After we shot the conversation scenes near the station and the non-cherry blossom scenes in the tidal basin area, we came back to the station to get on the train. We were extremely exhausted by then, because we shot everything in an hour. Our extras for the scene arrived and we got on the train. Everything felt chaotic inside the train. In the beginning, we panicked because the train car that we wanted to film in was packed with people. After 5 minutes of terror, Sue politely asked if they would willingly move to other parts of the train. Everyone was very nice and gave us the place that we wanted to shoot in. It was a busy hour of me trying to get as many takes as possible without getting caught by anyone. As I was shooting, Jack and other crew members would cue me whenever someone was coming towards me, and I would just drop the camera to a seat next to me and act as if nothing was going on. We got the last shot got 3 minutes before it was time for us to get off at Penn station. After the final shot, I high fived Sue and shouted that it was a wrap.

         We let everyone go, dropped off all of our props and equipment, sent our actors away, and we were actually done. When we were walking back to Sue’s place after everything was over, we talked about how we couldn’t believe that we are done with shooting. We had planned this film for a year and now we are done shooting it. We do have to edit it at some point but I don’t want to think about that right now.

The Line Between Fiction and Reality Was Overrated Anyway (Treva)

I have discovered a new favorite niche genre: paranormal mockumentary. Or whatever Mermaids: The Body Found can be defined as. Because this film, aired on Animal Planet in May 2012 and The Discovery Channel three weeks later, isn’t funny per se. There is no joke, no “mock” in sight. All 90 minutes are presented as an entirely straightforward, scientifically factual documentary on how mermaids exist—having branched off from human evolution some seven million years ago—and the US Navy is engaged in a vast conspiracy to conceal this from the public so they can continue testing SONAR weapons in the ocean.

I could make this up if I tried, which is why Animal Planet and The Discovery Channel should really hire me to write and direct a similar film on dragons—which they’ve made before, in Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real, but that took the coward’s way out and admitted that dragons do not, in fact, exist today. Mermaids: The Body Found does not for a moment admit to being fiction. In fact, it over and over includes just enough factual data to leave the viewer wondering, just briefly, “could this be real?”

Because there really has been debate about the Navy testing SONAR weapons and how those may or may not have a harmful affect on marine mammals. The “aquatic ape” hypothesis has been proposed twice, independently, in 1942 and 1960. Christopher Columbus really did claim to have seen mermaids on his way to the “New World”, there really are people in Brazil who partner with dolphins to fish, and there really is a cave in Egypt, in the desert by what used to be a shore, with primitive paintings of what anthropologists think are humans swimming.

Mind you, the people in the paintings don’t have tails, as Mermaids depicts. And historians are fairly sure Columbus saw manatees—he certainly didn’t describe them as having “pale, speckled bellies, dark blue backs, and paddle-shaped tails.” There was never a mass whale beaching in Washington in April 2004, and the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis has been discredited and disproved every time it’s been suggested.

Yet the film stands in fascinating contrast to something like What We Do in the Shadows, a 2014 mockumentary in which, per the explanation provided in text at the start, “each crew member wore a crucifix and was granted protection by the subjects of the film.” Yes, that’s right: it followed vampires around in their nightly lives.

In Wellington, New Zealand.

What We Do in the Shadows has all the mock. It parodies the sort of documentary that explores subcultures by presenting a subculture that obviously does not exist. It makes fun of vampires (and werewolves, zombies, witches…) by continuously playing with the incongruity between the darkness, terror, and perhaps even erotic intrigue the audience is led to expect from legends like Dracula and Nosferatu and the mundane details of living in a flat in Wellington, NZ. They bicker over the chore roster. Viago (Taika Waititi) puts down towels before he kills people, so the blood doesn’t get everywhere. And, my favorite (SPOILERS AHEAD): the romantic intrigue does enter with the Dracula-like character of Vladislav (Jemaine Clement), who once tyrannically ruled a small chunk of Eastern Europe before he was defeated in epic battle by his arch-nemesis “the Beast.” In classic documentary style, manuscripts and artwork of the battle are shown while Vladislav narrates his tragic story.

…Only for it to later be revealed that “the Beast” is his name for his ex-girlfriend, Pauline, who refers to him as “Asshole.”

Mermaids, however, has none of that. Even one of the most potentially incongruous moments, the one and only time a live mermaid appears onscreen in the modern day (rather than in the openly CGI segments set millions of years in the past) is absolutely serious. In Shadows, the head-height, handheld camera removes a great deal of grandeur from the occasional fights—as does the fact that the vampires look anything but elegant when they take to the air or hiss at each other like angry cats. It’s amateurish and ridiculous. Whereas the brief attack of two boys by a SONAR-wounded merman, shot with a shaky cameraphone from 2004, is amateur in a way that evokes true terror, not to mention unofficialism. That is, this is what the government doesn’t want you to see. The merman, too, hisses, as it lunges sideways into the narrow frame (who knows what else could be beyond the viewer’s field of vision…) But where the vampires, grown men is costumes from the 1700s and before, seem absurd, the mermaid is fierce and animalistic.

And terrified, and hurt. It’s already been established at that point that the other beached beings—whales—were literally bleeding from their ears, and had been something like physically bombarded by subsonic SONAR. They had blunt force trauma. It’s easy to see the merman’s distress as human, too. When the vampires in Shadows are humanized, they are made petty and amusing, with chore charts and ex-girlfriends—normal problems. The mermaids, on the other hand, are humanized with emotion, such as in the segment set 1.6 million years ago, in which one sacrifices himself to distract a megalodon shark away from the rest of his migrating pod. Though the voiceover calls the group of mermaids a “pod”, as if they were dolphins, rather than something more human like “clan” or “tribe”, the emotion in the merman’s eyes is as real as CGI can make it, and the music swells with piping sorrow as he awaits the megalodon’s jaws.

Yet the narration is dehumanizing, and it is the only words spoken in these part of the film in which the story of the NOAA scientists investigating mermaids in the modern day is punctuated with the same sort of flashback one would expect to see in any documentary on some animal’s evolution. The mermaids don’t speak a recognizable language, but the narrator has the same sort of deep, serious voice that always narrates nature documentaries. And we have all seen tragic nature documentaries, with death-by-predator and soaring, tragic pipes in the soundtrack. The conceit here is simply that instead of CGIing ancient mammoths or crocodiles or whatever, the teams at Animal Planet and The Discovery Channel have simulated mermaids. With just as much factual data as they would the mammoths and crocodiles.

I want more. I’m an imaginative woman; I can go along, laughing, with the conceit that there are awkward vampires living in Wellington. I’m perfectly to accept that as reality, just for fun. But it’s even better that every varyingly-accurate “fact” cited in this article was something I actually paused Mermaids: The Body Found in order to google, because I wasn’t sure whether to believe them or not. The film was entirely scientific, no magic in sight, but that only made it easier for my logic-conditioned mind to accept that the world might really be more magical than I had thought. That’s a gift.

So yes, I’d like one on dragons next, and then fairies—I know there’s a blurry photo of them somewhere from late 19^th century England or so. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that on the internet. Then maybe unicorns? Bigfoot? The Loch Ness Monster? I’m sure those already exist, but not professionally, by people actively making things up to support the theory. Yes, it might be confusing—but what’s wrong with looking up half a dozen different scientific and historical facts in an hour and a half? I learned things! And if you can’t be bothered to hit the search bar, well, the line between fiction and reality is overrated anyway

Help! I'm in Love with a Horrible Movie (Rachel)

Over the years, less and less people have been asking me The Question. “Rachel, what’s your favorite movie?” I’m sure it’s because word’s gotten around about how difficult The Question is for film majors to choose just one, but I guess it’s also because I stopped answering with my actual favorite film. It is true that I’ve always found answering The Question difficult, but it’s more so because my favorite film, Sunshine (2007) is not your usual answer. I get strange looks, even from my fellow film-majors, because who doesn’t answer with the expected, Citizen Kane, or War-Kong Wai’s In the Mood for Love? And absolutely no one, not even my closest friends, had seen Sunshine before I made them watch it. So even if I do answer the question truthfully, I get a second question-- Well what is it about? And quite simply, I can never do the movie justice.

I first watched Sunshine my senior year in highschool. I was in the Advanced Creative writing class and for the last unit, my teacher decided to introduce us to writing for Film. He showed us a number of greats, Fargo and No Country for Old Men, just to name a few, but the last film we watched was Sunshine. Though I don’t remember what my final script project was for the class, I remember every moment of watching that movie. It was raining outside, so the room was dark and cozy like a movie theater. Some of my classmates were doing homework, but others, like me, settled in our seats as our professor introduced the film.

“This is a movie,” He said. “Watch it.”

The film begins with a basic premise: In the year 2057, our sun is dying. The earth, due to the lack of heat, has frozen over into a second ice age, and humanity is slowly succumbing to it. A team of scientists embark on a mission, the second of its kind, to place a nuclear bomb in the center of the sun in order to jump start it. Simple right? Basic sci-fi premise, apocalypse scenario. You’ve probably heard a similar story a thousand times. The beginning of the film is likewise standard, with the crewmembers of the Icarus II, their gigantic, sun-reflecting spaceship, discussing the importance of their mission, and how they can succeed when the previous mission, Icarus I, failed. The previous mission had lost contact with earth seven years prior, and the fate of the crew is unknown-- but the sun was still dying, so Earth knew that Icarus I had failed.

Everything goes well for a time in the Icarus II. The crew have a fully functioning bio-center which produces the oxygen needed for their long journey to the sun, they have plenty of food, and for the most part, the crew gets along with one another. When they happen upon the floating corpse of the Icarus I, however, everything goes downhill, fast. I held my breath as they chose to explore the abandoned ship-- partly because of the suspense, and partly because of the immense amount of white, floating dust present on every surface. I wondered what could have caused this dust to aggregate on an empty space ship if all the crew were dead… and then the realization hit me. It was the crew.

A lot of the film is like this. It twists and winds along unknown paths, but you feel led to every development through subtle clues. It shocks you with realizations that you knew deep down, but didn’t want to admit to yourself. A big part of the film is surprisingly focused around religion-- or more specifically the question of humanity's place in the universe. The theme of dust makes this particularly evangelical, as one of the characters states, “At the end of time, a moment will come when just one man remains. Then the moment will pass. Man will be gone. There will be nothing to show that we were ever here... but stardust.” Sounds familiar, right? Along the lines of “For you are dust, And to dust you shall return,” from the Bible. Now I’m not saying that Sunshine is the most original movie, but it’s certainly effective.

One of my favorite parts of the film does appear until nearly the end. The “monster” or “alien” that infects the spaceship in fact, is never clearly seen. Though I won’t spoil exactly what this monster is, he is shown as being a liminal creature, never quite existing in the physical world, but certainly physical enough to start picking off the crew members one by one. The way the camera moves around him is both terrifying and unique, with a lens-baby like wetness that makes it feel as if you are in a nightmare, unable to open your eyes fully. Though much of the film is filled with beautiful, wide-landscaped shots of the Icarus I and space, it is these close, intimate, and disturbing close-calls with this monster that truly make the film different from any other sci-fi flick.

So why is Sunshine my favorite? Well, I’d be lying if I didn’t say it’s one of the reasons I became interested in film in the first place. In the rainy-darkness of that classroom in highschool, I watched a film that incorporated both a mind-blowing story, with incredible visuals, and a monster that you don’t even have to see to be afraid of.

After watching this film a hundred times, of course I saw it flaws-- but every film student finds flaws in film, even their favorite ones, and still loves them all the same. Though Sunshine has a 76% on rotten tomatoes, and all my film friends give me funny looks when I mention it, this movie will always have a special place in my heart. So don’t be afraid to like horrible movies. If you love it, go ahead and love it, and say proudly it’s your favorite. Because loving a horrible movie doesn’t mean you have bad taste in film, it just means you love it’s flaws just as much as you love what is good about it…and you learn from that. So love your film’s flaws. Love it’s cheesy one-liners and predictable plot, and never worry about answering The Question ever again. 

And it might just make you love film more.

Production Diary #5 (Hee Won)

Production diary 5

         In my last post, I talked about the disasters that surrounded our miscalculation of the cherry blossoms’ peak bloom. We needed the cherry blossoms but cherry blossoms were blooming earlier than planned. We were not ready to shoot but we went down to DC anyways thinking that we are going to figure something out when we got there. We did, but it wasn’t easy.

         Deciding whether or not we should go to DC to film cherry blossoms was not easy. We did not have any of our actors with us. In our script, Ghunja looks at the cherry blossoms, and in  our storyboard, we have a back shot of her looking at the fully bloomed cherry blossoms. As I mentioned in the previous post, we called our actor to ask if she would be available, but she could not come down on such short notice. We brainstormed what we could possibly to do to make this work. One solution we thought of was to get a body-double. We knew it was not the best idea, since the a body double would be very noticeable to the audience, with the numerous tracking shots of our actor’s back that throughout the film. However, we decided to look for someone anyway, a 5’6 female who wears size 8 shoes. After sending hundreds of Facebook messages we managed to find one person who could match. However, she was only available from 11am to 3pm which was a very narrow time window, considering we had to drive to DC, park our car, get the equipment out, film everything, and drive back.

Another big problem was that we didn’t have anyone to help us shoot. We needed at least one or two people to help us carry equipment but everyone was busy or had class. If we were to go to DC, it would be just Sue and me and we would have to be back by 4pm because we both had classes that we could not miss. Also, we could not get the digital back up camera that we wanted. Although our we are shooting on 16mm, we wanted to get some shots on digital just in case. We were thinking about using either the Black Magic or Canon C300 for the back up camera but neither of them were available for that date. We were able reserve a Canon 5D Mark II in the end, but we weren’t ecstatic because we wanted a camera that could shoot 4K.

         We could not make a decision right away because there were so many complications. We only had five hours to do everything and it seemed almost impossible. On Wednesday night, after exchanging a couple of serious texts we decided to go to DC by ourselves. We knew that things would not go smoothly but we thought that it would still be worth it. Because we could not guarantee that we would be back before 3pm, we told our body double not to come. We decided to get a lot of POV shots and B roll of the cherry blossoms. Before I went to sleep, I packed everything that I needed for the shoot in my living room and wrote down all the shots that I needed. I was tossing and turning all night and get much sleep because I was terrified.  

         As soon as I woke up the next morning, I headed to Gilman 35 to check all the equipment that I needed. I checked the cameras, batteries, tripods and anything that could possibly go wrong. Just looking at all the equipment Sue and I would have to carry made me want to cry, but I took out all the equipment one by one thinking that everything was going to be okay. We had all the equipment loaded in the car by 11:30 am and headed for DC.

         By 12pm we were very happy with the situation. The weather was great, we were on schedule and nothing was wrong with the equipment. Because everything was going so well, I started to feel uneasy. Sue told me to shut up when I told her that something would go wrong during the shoot.

         When we got to the National Mall, we realized that I was right after all. We thought that the location would not be crowded because it was 3pm on a Thursday, but we could not have been more wrong. The streets were filled with tourists and none of the parking lots had spaces. This was a huge problem because we did not have PAs to control pedestrians as we were filming and we needed couple of wide shots that looked pretty empty. On top of that, the traffic was horrible because there were so many cars and people walking on the roads. We lost about an hour just looking for parking and we were getting nervous because it was already almost 2pm when we miraculously found a place to park. We needed to shoot everything in an hour with all the equipment that we had.

  

       In the end, we got some B-roll of the cherry blossoms and got some footage from near the tidal basin area. It was very challenging and time-consuming with so many people trying to take selfies and group photos near us. It was also exhausting because we had a very heavy camera, a tripod, and equipment. It was a hassle, but we managed to get the most important scenes on film. We wanted to shoot more but we had to get back to Homewood as soon as possible and we were already late. During the shoot, we had some issues with the gate; we saw dust particles in the frame when we were shooting towards the end and could not figure out exactly where it was. We won’t find out how everything turned out until late April when we get our film is processed, so it is very frightening and thrilling at the same time.

         We left the parking lot at about 3:15pm, thinking that we will probably be 20 minutes late for class. We were wrong again. The traffic was so bad that it was 5pm when we got back to Homewood campus. We were an hour late for class.

         One most important takeaway from this hectic shoot was that you just have to be prepared for the worst situations. I have three more shooting days left, in less than 10 days, and one of them requires scenes that take place on a moving train. How exciting. (but actually not).