[Weekly Update] June 8, 2022

I'm back from a film shoot! I survived! I shot 200+ takes in two days! I'm tired!

But I still have one more day to go, so update will still be a little bit erratic. 

Anyway, I got some really great shots and I can't wait to show you.

CHANNEL UPDATE

The next video is now being edited. It'll be about why kung fu movie and Chinese patriotism/nationalism are so intertwined with each other, and why that hasn't always been the case. Script will be uploaded soon.

The video after will be about a Hong Kong indie film, Gallants. It'll serve as a pseudo-continuation of the kung fu patriotism video, and discuss how newer generation Hong Kong filmmakers and audience see old kung fu movies, as well as lightly explore the future of Hong Kong kung fu cinema.

Finally, we'll have a video on the structure of Ring, and why it is my favourite horror movie of all time. It will be followed up with a video on Audition, a Miike classic.

I know we also voted to talk about Mothra Trilogy in the summer. I'll cover that once our schedule is less hectic.

MEDIA TALK

So, I've been shooting my short film for the past 3 days. It's my first attempt at a martial arts short film, and boy, it was a learning experience.

The first thing I learnt: I'm really bad at scheduling.

Okay, that's not true. I  always knew I'm bad at setting up schedules. As I jokingly said on set: My films aren't ambitious, my schedules are. In 2 days, we shot over 230 takes of materials, with 60+ shots. That's an insane amount of materials for a total of 20 hours.

And you have to remember that some of those are fight scenes. This is the actual first thing I learn: How fight scenes are planned and filmed. A lot of productions just film the same fights multiple times from different angles, as to make the editing easier. That quickly exhausts the actor, lowering the intensity of action. The editor, in turn, has to mask over that exhaustion by rapid cuts, which I suspect is why Hollywood fight scenes are often edited like hot garbo.

We have neither the time nor the resources to do that on set. And I also have a conscience, and don't want to exhaust my actors. So, we did pre-visualization, so we can film the action in small chunks, shot by shot. Originally I wanted to show the pre-vis on social media. But because I'm so inexperience, the pre-vis looks like an absolute mess. A lot of notes were taken, and the shots were fixed on set. I cannot tell you how vital that process of filming pre-vis is.

Another thing I learnt: Actors need time to rehearse their fights. With a pre-vis, fight scenes can be filmed at about the same speed as a dialogue scene, if you film the fight without audio. Just like dialogues, actors need to rehearse, remember, and practice the moves, which does take time. It does sound obvious, but on set when you see actors seemingly staring at their phone or goofing together, chances are, they are trying to figure out the rhythm of the fight.

And the final lesson of the day: Shot types from film school are useless! You know the simple "close-up, medium, wide shot, over the shoulder" shot types? Yeah, almost none of those worked in a fight scene. Almost all of those shots are designed for faces and faces alone, and the system completely collapses when we are filming action. It goes against my every nature having to cut off part of the actors face, so the camera can follow the swing of a sword, but that is indeed how actions are filmed. I learnt a whole new set of compositions that are more tailored to action filmmaking, and that is going to be super useful in the future.

Maybe when the film is finished, I'll do a behind the scene video or a deep dive into what I learnt from this experience. But for now, I'll have to focus on finishing the work for this channel and this film. More info about the film in the near future. For now, I'll see you in the next update!