Behind the Scenes of a Student Film Production

Posted by tsubaki | Filed under Personal

Sorry for the lack of updates and sudden disappearance. I’ve been busy lately shooting two short films. For my school, we have to produce 2 to 3 films a semester, mainly one that is commonly referred to as the “Solo Project”, where we have to write, direct, shoot and edit a film by our own and a “Group Project”, where it’s an actual production with designated crew roles.

Over the weekend, I was working on my Solo Project and had to miss the KALEIDOSCOPE event. =(

The Solo Project is no easy feat especially when you’re ambitious. It’s hard to do it all alone, so we usually rope in a few friends to help with certain roles, and for my case I preferred working in a small group where we can shoot and run, the typical Singapore Film-making Guerrilla shooting style. And yes, I was being rather ambitious.

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to show you guys a little behind the scenes of how a small scale student production works.

We have to produce a film every semester, and since I’m in Level 2 now this makes it my 3rd Solo film. This semester’s theme is about an Encounter. It’s vague and open ended, so we are pretty much left to our devices to produce anything, as long as it answers to this theme. I wrote a script about an extremely innocent and naive girl who met a swindler and got cheated. It sounds simple, but underneath this it is a big twist which has clues planted all over the place, only revealing towards the end.

But boy is this bitch a complicated script to shoot.

For my talents, I roped in two friends- Isaac, a former classmate of mine who also acted in my 2nd Solo film, and Vanda, otherwise more uncommonly known as tjhan’s wife (when he realized he doesn’t have any anime left to watch, of course). Both are amateur actors, but have very a pretty strong screen presence and chemistry. I usually work with amateur talents because I don’t have the money to hire professionals, and the actors in my School of Acting are mostly Caucasians and they don’t fit what I need.

Despite being completely horrendous at my Mother Tongue language (which is Chinese btw), I always shoot my films in either Chinese or Dialect (like Hokkien or Teochew) because it’s more authentic. While Singapore is a very English speaking country, English speaking yellow-skinned people don’t often translate well on to screen. That’s just my opinion, but take a good look at our local English TV channel and you’ll cringe and agree with me!

Also, since my examiners are all Caucasians (si ang moh), I CAN CHEAT WITH THE DIALOGUE USING SUBTITLES! HAHAHAHA. Yeah, I’m another Nyoro~n translation.

Alright, on to the details. This film was shot over two days with a shoe string budget on a Canon XL H1, a pretty good HDV camera that can shoot the HDV standard resolution of 1440×1080 pixels and has 3 native interlaced 1440×1080 CCDs. It can shoot in either HDV or SD (Standard Definition), and before you go Whoaaaa with the HD word in HDV, HDV does not equal HD. It’s a compressed version of HD, using MPEG2 to squeeze data onto a MiniDV tape but it’s way better than SD.

And if in case you are wondering who that guy with curly hair is, it’s me. I permed by hair a couple of months back but had it cut short a few weeks ago because the length was starting to get really annoying. I’ve got this thing for changing hairstyles like really often, so don’t mind me. And in the photo above, my hair’s really messy and I’m quite unshaven (the typical crew look during a shoot) because I’ve been busy.

Day 1 of this shoot is a simple interior bedroom scene, where Vanda’s character plays with a dolfie. And yeah, that’s Vanda’s personal dolfie. He’s changed quite a bit from his previous look and he lost his yaoi partner too. Now put a dumb but cute girl in a cute dress on a bed in a suggestive position and what do we get?

My film of course. Now stop having straying thoughts. Now on to Day 2.

You know it’s sad day when a Director has to push his own equipment trolley. But that’s the Solo project for you. No gaffers, grips or best boys at your bidding. The one thing I probably have to stress is how important and difficult a job a Director has. To most people, it sounds like an awfully glamorous job where you can minions under your bidding, mingle with stars and shout action/cut. Those are the perks, but the amount of pre-production planning and important decisions you have to make on the fly as a director really knocks a few years of your life span.

Planning the shooting script, the shots, carrying out your visions by commanding people under you, and drawing what you want from your talents already takes a lot of time and energy.

To have to do that and on top of that double up as the camera operator… it’s hell. Won’t go into the details, but you’ll have to make sure your focus is properly done (no cheating with auto focus!), composition, framing, etc, etc. Sometimes I end up directing the talents more and then forget simple things like focusing.

And with that camera’s viewfinder, it’s hard to tell your shots are out of focus until much later when you watch the rushes on a bigger screen. Rushes are basically the film terminology for footages that were shot and prepared for viewing. The Americans calls them Dailies.

This is the most important scene, but it was also the most problematic scene for me. My initial location that I wanted was Haji lane, but since I don’t have a van/car, it’s quite impossible to ferry people and equipment back and forth to the different locations so I decided to contain the entire shoot just in Sembawang.

I been scouting around the whole week and making sure the place is good, and to make sure the surrounding audio was good for recording.

But never would I expect the worst to happen. Fuck Murphy’s Law.

There was a Malay wedding ongoing nearby (omfg sound nightmare!) and there were shit loads of passerby on bicycles. SERIOUSLY, I SWEAR THERE WAS LIKE 2343253245634 PEOPLE ON BIKE ON MY FUCKING SHOOT. Every time I want to do a take, someone would just cycle in. It was like Holy Bike Sunday.

And then there were also a bunch of kids who went to the next block across and shouted and made a lot of noise to in order to catch my attention and disrupt the shoot. They thought it was pretty much to make moaning and haunting noises. I gave them the finger and a loud “HELLO EXCUSE ME?”. They disappeared.

The important scene. Mmmh, we had to do a lot of takes because we couldn’t quite work out the feel and flow to it, but thankfully we managed to pull it off before it rained.

Had to speak with my producer to see if we could finish off the other scenes. Time was already running out, the sky was darkening and the rain didn’t look like it was gonna stop any soon. We ended up switching schedules a little and shot another interior shot, this time a dining table scene.

And that’s pretty much about it. There were more locations, but we didn’t take pictures. Hope you guys enjoy it. This film is currently in the process of post-production, and it’s gonna take some time before it done. Whether or not I’ll release it on youtube… that’s to be decided later.